As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
The Fediverse doesn’t do algorithmic pushing and that’s a feature, not a bug.
The main ways to find new stuff on Mastodon are all actions taken by you, the user:
Hashtags. Watch and follow hashtags you like. Hashtags are the main way stuff is categorized, and if you use them liberally on your own posts and find others posting to those same tags you can find accounts which align with those interests of yours.
Home. Check out stuff in the “home” timeline which will be your neighbors on your own Mastodon instance. (In the case of general instances this isn’t so helpful, but in those instances themed around a hobby, subculture, geographical area, etc. you know you have that common ground with your neighbors to start with.)
Boosts. When you find people and accounts to follow, they boost (reblog/retweet) things they like, you find things to boost, etc. and it all works like a friend introducing you to their other friends, friends of friends, etc. leading to your own circle of friends increasing.
All these are things you do and you have to put a little work in to make them happen, but it’s purely fueled by your own interests and wants instead of the traditional social-media algorithm which does a little aligned-interest stuff but is mostly powered by whoever has money to pay the platform to force them into your timeline. On Twitter or Facebook you get shown what the platform thinks they can get paid by showing you. On the Fediverse the rules of invasive centralized ad-choked personal-data-harvesting social media don’t apply; you get shown what you actually want and request.
It’s different and change can be scary, but when you get used to the idea that things don’t have to work the old way anymore it can end up being a good thing.
The problem is that I as an user don’t necessarily know what I want to see. What if there is some super interesting hashtag out there, but I don’t even know that it exists?
Exactly, the reality is when I open Twitter I see content that is at least relevant to my interests, where as the sorting on Mastodon are of things that are of absolutely no interest. There’s a lot that you can say about algorithms, but there’s a reason it was the way it was in the first place.
I simply haven’t found as many good engaging posts in Mastodon, though, despite all that. It could be simply the challenge of building an interesting feed when you start from zero, but that’s a challenge nonetheless.
Algorithmic identification of novel content is in my mind neither intrinsically sinister nor beneficial; like all things, it’s a tool and the morality comes out of how it is used.
Things like (optional) recommendation tools could be a useful addition to Mastodon to help users find interesting threads. Could be run on a per instance basis.
The Fediverse doesn’t do algorithmic pushing and that’s a feature, not a bug.
The main ways to find new stuff on Mastodon are all actions taken by you, the user:
All these are things you do and you have to put a little work in to make them happen, but it’s purely fueled by your own interests and wants instead of the traditional social-media algorithm which does a little aligned-interest stuff but is mostly powered by whoever has money to pay the platform to force them into your timeline. On Twitter or Facebook you get shown what the platform thinks they can get paid by showing you. On the Fediverse the rules of invasive centralized ad-choked personal-data-harvesting social media don’t apply; you get shown what you actually want and request.
It’s different and change can be scary, but when you get used to the idea that things don’t have to work the old way anymore it can end up being a good thing.
If you think about it, this is actually the old way.
The problem is that I as an user don’t necessarily know what I want to see. What if there is some super interesting hashtag out there, but I don’t even know that it exists?
Removed by mod
Exactly, the reality is when I open Twitter I see content that is at least relevant to my interests, where as the sorting on Mastodon are of things that are of absolutely no interest. There’s a lot that you can say about algorithms, but there’s a reason it was the way it was in the first place.
I simply haven’t found as many good engaging posts in Mastodon, though, despite all that. It could be simply the challenge of building an interesting feed when you start from zero, but that’s a challenge nonetheless.
Algorithmic identification of novel content is in my mind neither intrinsically sinister nor beneficial; like all things, it’s a tool and the morality comes out of how it is used.
Things like (optional) recommendation tools could be a useful addition to Mastodon to help users find interesting threads. Could be run on a per instance basis.
Thank God it doesn’t
If you think about it, this is actually the old way.