I began trying to explain the Fediverse to two friends last night. I began with no ads, no algorithm and you only see the people you follow.
I was just drawing a breath to go into some of the challenging stuff (finding an instance etc) when my one friend replied, "oh, I could never do that".
It's a sharp reminder that there is a whole world of people out there who want algorithms, adverts, influencers and content.
I don't know if it's just that they've drunk the Kool-Aid or if the monsters of social media delivered what they wanted, but yeah. They exist.
I'm just glad I've found this sane, chronological, accessible, kind and friendly pocket of the internet
@mandy@cupoftea.social With no algorithm, only seeing posts from people you follow, Fedi would have no discovery. Thankfully, boosts exist, so you can discover the people who the people who you follow follow themselves, sometimes going through quite a few degrees. I think in a lot of ways you'd expect based on the setup for Fedi to be much worse than it actually is
@mandy@cupoftea.social “serendipitous discovery” is what a newspaper brings. Used to bring.
Serendip on Fedi needs to be sated, so maybe we could add a ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button that grabs posts from local feed, federated feed.
@mandy@cupoftea.social it would be neat to have an (transparent) algorithmic feed for masto/AP
Like one where you could be like "I'm feeling puppies today" and crank the puppy knob up to 11.
Or, if you're feeling social/political you could crank those knobs too
@mandy@cupoftea.social @kboyd@phpc.social I am very sad for them.
@cascheranno@hachyderm.io I feel like the Federated tab does that but I rarely go there. Pixelfed has the Explore tab which shows popular posts.
@ketmorco@fosstodon.org That's where hashtags come into their own. Follow them for one day. @mandy@cupoftea.social
@mandy@cupoftea.social @cascheranno@hachyderm.io When you are following interesting people, you will get their interesting boosts, that’s pretty serendipitous already.
@frumble@chaos.social @mandy@cupoftea.social @cascheranno@hachyderm.io I always recommend following hashtags.
@Tooden@aus.social @mandy@cupoftea.social my experience with hashtags is that they, uh, don't work very well with the default mastodon experience.
I tried and I don't even know if it worked or not, which should say something.
@phneutral@ruhr.social @mandy@cupoftea.social @cascheranno@hachyderm.io
The more I think about it the more I get the feeling it’s all actually about neurodiversity, which is forming these fundamentally different preferences for social media.
Therefore, super interesting thread about the expectancies of neurotypicals. I cannot even imagine the want to have algorithms, ever since Twitter introduced them in 2015, I searched for ways to just read chronically.
@frumble@chaos.social @phneutral@ruhr.social @cascheranno@hachyderm.io I wonder if there is research on that topic. Navigating the world socially is difficult enough, I guess we just want more predicability in our experience
@ketmorco@fosstodon.org @Tooden@aus.social that's a pity. I'm able to follow and browse hashtags on both the Pixelfed and Metatext apps
Mandy 🥶
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