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.
My timeline has always been this way. Third party clients man. They were so good.
Algorithmic timelines are toxic.
Hot take: Algorithmic timelines are cool, provided we can (1) opt out from the default algorithm and (2) plug in our own algorithms
Yeah as long as I can filter by what I personally want I have no issues with the site structuring my posts for me.
That would be awesome if people could just make their own algorithms, like when people say ‘just start your own instance’. Don’t like the way algorithm A does things? Try B or C, or make your own! I could see some weird filtering options appearing…
The virgin official app: NOOOOO!!! YOU NEED TO PAY A SUBSCRIPTION TO AVOID SEEING ALL THESE ADS DISGUISED AS POSTS!
The chad third party app: Hey man this whole thing is maintained by one dude so I gotta show a banner ad every now and again. I know that sucks so I’ll stop if you wanna make a one time donation of a buck or two.