Is Mastodon’s strictly chronological news feed based on a wrong assumption?
Is Mastodon’s strictly chronological news feed based on a wrong assumption?
The assumption is that centrally managed social media is bad because their algorithm is bad. But actually, they are bad because they are centrally managed and force one algorithm onto you. I’m not even advocating algorithm-by-choice. Even instance-specific algorithms would already work and would make the whole experience much more enjoyable and less boring. And if an instance’s algorithm(s) is too aggressive, it gets defederated. That would result in a much more exciting experience imo. And by the way: what’s the problem with getting old posts back in the timeline if it makes the overall conversation more interesting?
No. Just no. I like being in control of my timeline. I don’t need a computer to decide what I’ll find interesting.
Exactly why I stopped using Facebook because it was damned near impossible to have a chronological timeline on the app.
But you aren't anyway because the post that go into it depend on the people you follow. If you have an transparent algorithm that you like it doesn't change anything about that. It might just be a more enyoable experience if you choose your algorithm right.
…the post that go into it depend on the people you follow
Yes. Exactly. That’s right.
If you need an algorithm to curate your follows then you are following too much. Try muting some spam on your followed hashtags and trimming your followed accounts
Agree.
Even on sites with an algorithm (eg Reddit and Twitter) my experience was severely improved by trimming down the follow list and then always sorting by new.
Most people dont have an account for a single subject though. I could follow some software engineer and his posts about FOSS are going to have the same priority as his ramblings about politics or proper way to boil an egg.
I my experience so far, I need to follow hashtags to find people, but then eventually follow people to make a feed that isn't covered in crap... But even then the actual news get overshadowed by just random thoughts or replies thst are of no interest to me and discovery again becomes an issue.
And every time it's brought up people come up with a different solution; oh no you have to follow hashtags, oh no you have to follow people, oh no follow everything, but also curate and filter extensively, also multiple accounts, ugh. Tbh Id rather have an algorithm at this point.
No idea why you're getting downvoted when lemmy uses an algorithm by default.
Technically sort by top and some by new are algorithms. But that’s not what people talk about when they say algorithm with regards to social media it’s secret sauce engagement based algorithms used to show content.
The active and rising sort options are fairly simple and open source so we know exactly how it works
Okay, so people would then be fine if we add better trending / popular / related-to-your-interests feed to Mastodon? Because based on comments here they exclusively want the chronological feed, regardless of what your definition of algorithm is.
lemmy uses
Does it?
Probably because there exists a bit of a rift in the technical term 'algorithm' and how it's commonly used in discourse. Technically it describes both:
- An open-source algorithm that assigns a simple score based on votes, score and age, where two users subscribing to the same communities will always have the same result.
- A hidden algorithm that's based on an unknown amount of invisible variables, many of which are based on user-tracking, and tries to maximize time-spent at all costs.
While OP (hopefully) intended the former, most people immediately think of the latter when the term is used. Personally I'd like to see an implementation of the former as well, as a simple way to get up speed on the most important things that happened over night for example, before switching back to chronological timeline.
Also:
- A open, customizable algorithm that lets the user set their own priorities, and if it does any "learning" based on user actions, it's geared toward the user's priorities and easy for the user to see and correct what it's learned.
Again, key factors being: open, customizable, correctable, and serving the user, not serving the platform.
I guess I can understand how some may be concerned about the latter happening, but given mastodon is open source a hidden algorithm isn't really possible (barring some esoteric technique like code obfuscation)
Lemmy uses simple filters. It has no memory of what you have looked at and takes nothing into consideration other than the chosen filter at the moment. You can even link directly to the filter because it is part of the url.
https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&page=1&sort=Hot
This is searching for the entire federated space of lemmy.world and sorting by hot. You might argue that "hot" is an algorithm, but it is also only determined by things such as creation date, upvotes and comments. Everyone gets exactly the same view so it isn't specially curated.
I just started using Mastodon. It's been around 10 days or so. I am already having a lot of good engagement there. I guess "no algorithm" works best for me. I used to get bored of scrolling twitter or even reddit within 15 minutes or so. On Mastodon on certain days I can easily spend 45 minutes or more.
My experience on Mastodon was never really satisfying. Most of what I see are post with one or mostly zero engagements from other peopel and that's just boring.
But actually, they're bad for both reasons.
I guess one issue about engineering a well performing algorithm is that ot only works if you collect a real high amount of personal data and label it with stereotype based labels. And then you have to do the same with every content shared on the platform.
If you do this publicly, people will have problems with the labels of their posts.Your awesome idea gets labeled as left wing utopic dream? Your rant about that new movement is conservative and populistic?
Might be true, but will offend people.Are they labeled this way in other social media networks?
Agreed