I have been on the edge with twitter and reddit for a while and I have finally deleted my accounts that I have had for a very long time there. They are no longer the places I used to know, even more so with twitter. I am ready for my new time here and on mastodon.
Hello Lemmy
I know the fact that it doesn’t have one is kind of a feature, but I do wish Mastodon had some sort of algorithm feed. I liked that after I liked a couple of football/soccer tweets, Twitter started surfacing popular football tweets, even if they didn’t have any hashtags.
This is the huge problem with Masrodon imo. Twitter has all kinds of crazy algorithms, often bad and leaning towards hate/fear. Mastodon seems to be on the far other end with very little to drive engagement.
This is why a Reddit-type use (Lemmy) is perfect. The algorithm is mostly human driven with upvotes/downvotes.
This a huge benefit of federated content. I have never been force-fed content from an AlGoRiThYm that was remotely relevant to my interests.
That said, if someone does successfully develop a bot that does take into consideration my eclectic tastes, it can be easily implemented due to the open nature of ActivityPub. It is unlikely be corrupted by commercial interests to manipulate me, and if it does, I have the ability to ignore it.
I mean I’ve found plenty of cool content, creators, and other accounts that completely align with my interests through algorithms. Right now the only way to find content that matches your interests on something like Mastodon is searching hashtags and hoping that people actually use them.
The problem with algorithms is that they drive you into silos without you even realizing it. They always start out as very helpful but then turn against the user unintentionally. In all honesty the best thing FB, Twitter, etc could do is allow you to completely turn it off. That way you can take a break from the silo to see the normal world. It’s why services like Reddit and Lemmy are working so well. You can go to a community and see similar stuff posted or go to the all pages and see shit you didn’t even know existed.