In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).

Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] The_Tribble_Juggler@kbin.social 129 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Mastodon is cool, and I'd use it more if I could get used to the format. The Lemmy/Reddit forum style is my preference.

[–] notatoad@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Mastodon is a good reminder of why algorithmic feeds exist

The option for a chronological feed is nice, but without an algorithm filling in the gaps it’s really hard to get started on there

[–] iByteABit@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Meh, I'm sick of all the algorithmic crap. The internet used to be better when people needed a couple brain cells to use them.

[–] notatoad@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

"content recommendation is only for stupid people" is a brand new form of gatekeeping that i haven't heard before!

[–] iByteABit@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

What I'm actually saying is, that user experience is obviously harder without the algorithms, but algorithms (ML ones) are what brought the internet to this state. So I'd rather live without them wherever that's viable.

[–] Izzy@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I completely agree. I like the concept of Mastodon and like that it exists, but I just can't get into the idea of following individual or organizations rather than topics. Thankfully Lemmy is a thing.

[–] BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

FWIW you can follow hashtags in mastadon If you know where to look you can see trending hashtags In other fedi clients (particularly firefish) you can configure antennae and channels to give you the ability to have pre-set feed filters and focuses (e.g. search by hashtag, keyword/subject, etc) You can also curate lists (can include people you don't follow if you don't want) in case you want to look at what the law or history or cycling people on fedi are talking about just now. Often when I want to change subject I'll check to see what #lawFedi or #histodon or #biketooter have to offer today

If that sounds a bit like rolling your own algorithms, that's probably because it sort of is

[–] Izzy@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It sounds worth trying if people are good at tagging. I might have to try again.

[–] BillDoor@feddit.uk 8 points 2 years ago

I have the same problem as you with mastodon, I'm interested in topics not in people so the format just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I've had very limited success with following hashtags, it sounds like a neat idea, but I've not found enough hashtags that I'm interested in with enough activity to make it worthwhile.

The nature of it also makes it more superficial - it's short comments and posts on a topic rather than more in depth discussion.

In the end, I think mastodon is a really neat replacement for twitter - but I never had a twitter account for a reason, and those reasons are still there with mastodon, for me at least.

[–] lorax@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 years ago

I prefer pull vs push media. Less intrusive. I have a feeling lemmy users may also like RSS feeds for the control it provides. I know in mastodon you decide who to follow, but the whole culture to encourage re-blogging means a lot of potential unwanted crap in our feeds.

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

Agreed

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

Agreed. I love decentralized social media, but I never liked Twitter and never really could adjust to Mastodon either.