this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Mastodon went in two seriously wrong directions, but seems to remedy them which is difficult. First they have no proper quote supporting and failing to realize all communication works this way on the internet. Be it comments on articles, all the newspapers quoting others and thus creating those articles etc. Second the lack of algorithms due to a misguided opinion they are inherently evil. What we got instead is a random feed of random messages where a news like structure like on Twitter is not possible. Extremely important events are buried behind tons of crappy posts. And the only region for whom the explore tab is working is America as nothing is localized. Also scrolling through the feed doesn't tell you what seems to garner attraction by the number of comments. So most clicks are wasted on deadend topics.
Hard agree on the algorithm point.
So what would be the solution as I believe many fedinautes and mastonautes agree on the fact that the way traditional social network did their algorithms is bad. Should the community develop a new kind of algorithm? Or a functionality to build your own?
I would love for some interoperable interface with a few default choices and then the option to load customized open source options!
It stems from a somewhat reactionary (in a "I don't want chemicals in my food" way) prospective where they knew the outcome of algorithms was bad but didn't understand why it was bad. Now they have their own algorithm and it's repeating a lot of the same mistakes.
The chemicals analogy is actually pretty genius!
We've all seen a "I don't want chemicals in my food" reactionary. They're not racist or anything just fueled more by anger than by principal.
Explore tab is sorted by language, not by region, so it works too for any sufficiently large foreign language country (Spain/Latin America, Portugal/Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan).
I wish Mastodon implemented Akkoma-style bubbles of related instances, which would allow to create, like, Explore tab but only from (manually selected) several Australian instances.
That wasn't clear to me by the UI and I didn't see the easy switch option.
I'm pretty sure Mastodon has algorithms. All internet infrastructure runs on algorithms, except for weird experimental AI stuff.
it sounds like bluesky would fit your use case. mastodon is not a twitter clone and never has been.
Twitter has two tabs, one with and the other one with less algorithms, Mastodon should do that as well. The discussion is about improving it and Bluesky is in its infancy.
what you are trying to do is not what mastodon is for.
mastodon has already achieved its goal.
your efforts are better targeted towards bluesky and their Feeds API. itβs exactly what you are asking for.