Mastodon unironically needs more algorithms. A friend who posts once a week, impossible to catch it. A friend who mostly replies to people, also too hard to catch. An area where the tech development clearly drags behind bluesky.
Or rather doesn't drag behind, is inexistent because of some freaky homemade digital-amish style ideology against "algorithms".
As several people have pointed out, phanpy is looking pretty interesting and actually dares to experiment a bit! I hope it ends up on fdroid
@powersource Even if the message is often simplified to that, I don't think people actually oppose so much to "algorithms". What they want is control over the way content is served to them, and when something like Phanpy for example offers a tool to "catch up", it's well appreciated.
In the end it's not so much Mastodon that needs more algorithms, it's the fediverse clients.
@powersource I'm sorry that it's not working for you; I can only offer my own experience, which is that it's perfect.
@powersource you can catch the friend who posts once a week (and anyone else) by setting up notifications for their posts
@powersource your best bet is probably using a client app that gives you more options for sorting and filtering posts, like @phanpy . I think there are some iOS apps that allow this but I'm not sure which. I doubt Mastodon will support custom algorithms like on Bluesky anytime soon, the community is convinced that algorithms are inherently evil even if they are opt-in and there is no financial incentive to make a user-hostile algorithm.
@powersource @cassidy add important folks to lists. Every account also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. You can also turn on post notifications for individual accounts.
There may not be an algorithm but there are plenty of tools.
@jcrabapple eh hacky tools that the vast majority of users will never figure out
@jcrabapple show me one person not on mastodon who knows how to use rss
@powersource but... we're talking about Mastodon.
If you're on Mastodon you can surely figure out RSS.
Or you know, click a button on someone's profile.
@powersource This might be a feature of the Mastodon implementation, but at least with the default Mastodon server: once you follow someone you can activate a notification whenever they post something.
A friend who posts once a week, impossible to catch it.
If one's reading throughput stays a constant, some posts must be missed. Agreed that alternative feed order (i.e. algorithm) like round-robin can be beneficial in this case, but it's heavily depends on the user's social circle and can be done completely client-side. BTW the common workaround for this is to set up lists based on people's posting frequency.
A friend who mostly replies to people, also too hard to catch.
For this one in particular, @powersource, one can follow such friend from other ActivityPub implementations such as Pleroma et al or Misskey et al, which do show replies on the home timeline.
The point of the Fediverse is to make such diversity possible to suit different people's preferences. There is no feed order that is one-size-fits-all, hence something that is centralized like Bluesky can't even begin to compare on the tech front.
@powersource @tommi Yes AND I think the main problem is understanding where these algos will run. With ATProto it is a seamless experience but it requires you to have your own server, domain, and some technical knowledge.
I am working on #BYOTA (https://github.com/mozilla-ai/byota) to bring algorithms in the hand of their users (they run 100% locally), but it is still a PoC and I would like to find a better way to give ppl as much control as possible without leaving their current clients. Happy to chat :-)
@powersource A simple approach to this would be a view of *people* you follow, sorted by most recent activity, and each person is shown with their latest few posts/replies/boosts.
You can click through to their profile, where you can see their full journal (yes, I'm still Scuttlebutt-brained). This serves the use case “I wonder what <person> is up to”.
Chattier people would still rise to the top, but they wouldn't take up any more space than the quieter folk.
I don't need a timeline of posts because I don't come here for posts. I come here for people, so show me people.
@greytheearthling the client we deserve
@greytheearthling @powersource
Lists will work fine for that.
But they need you to explicitly put people in them, and to check the list. It would be nice if you could float the new entries in your lists toward the top of your main feed, perhaps marked in a different color or something like that.
@greytheearthling @powersource i use lists for this.
I have a list called "closer contacts" and then I add those types of people to that list. I always make sure to see every single post in that list