Markus Unterwaditzer wrote a blog that does into the practical problems that he encounters with Mastodon’s chronological timeline. He notes that the lack of algorithmic feed makes it hard to connect with followers in different timezones, or followers who do not post a lot. Mastodon proposes lists as a partial solution to help with organising and taking control of your feed. But as the blog notes, lists require a high amount of effort of people to use and maintain, significantly more than what the average person can be expected to be willing to put into.
Algorithmic feeds are not impossible in the fediverse. Most fediverse servers however have pushed the option to implement algorithmic feeds away from the server to the client. There are separate solutions that provide an algorithmic view on someones personal Mastodon timeline, such as fediview and FeedSeer. The way these systems work is that they ingest all the posts on your timeline, and then sort them via simple, easy-to-understand algorithms that the user can choose from. They effectively function quite similar to other 3rd party clients as Phanpy or Elk, with the exception that they only provide the algorithmically sorted timelines.
@Moof says here that he was hoping there to be more mobile clients that would have incorporated some sort of algorithmic view at this point. I personally also would have also expected more to be happening in this space. The most notable clients who provide some form of algorithmic feed are Mammoth and SoraSNS. One issue seems to be that placing the algorithm in the client instead of in the server introduces significant lag in the client. Both Fediview and Feedseer can take quite a while to load, Fediview took more than 20 seconds to load. This is also visible in SoraSNS, where I scroll quicker than the algorithm can calculate the next post, introducing frequent pauses where the timeline is still loading the next post. Although I would love to see more experimenting with algorithmic timelines in fediverse clients, I’m not sure if the barrier of long loading times will be easy to overcome if the client also has to do the algorithmic calculations.
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Sounds like some more people who weren’t looking for a Twitter alternative but a Twitter replacement. And as it takes them too long to get a Bluesky invitation, they want Mastodon in particular as well as the Fediverse as a whole to become as much like Twitter as possible. Down to obscure, secret-sauce algorithms.
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> Sounds like some more people who weren’t looking for a Twitter alternative but a Twitter replacement. And as it takes them too long to get a Bluesky invitation, they want Mastodon in particular as well as the Fediverse as a whole to become as much like Twitter as possible.
That’s kind of a leap, don’t you think? Just because somebody wants better discovery features doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to make our network exactly in the same image as the old one. Even if it strongly resembled the old network visually and functionally, isn’t the bigger goal to get people off of corporate social networks and into a space where they can feel independent? Who are we to tell other people how to use the web?
> Down to obscure, secret-sauce algorithms.
Here’s the thing: algorithm has practically become a naughty word in various communities, even though algorithms in and of themselves are harmless. An algorithmic sort process on a fediverse server doesn’t really have to “phone home” to some large corporate database somewhere in order to function. A lot of people tend to confuse the abuses of Facebook and Twitter’s timelines and the concept of algorithmic feeds, but there’s literally no reason we can’t develop an open source one that focuses on varying points of interest specified by the user, in a way that respects and preserves privacy.
@laurenshof Hi Lauren that’s really interesting. Yes from our experience at https://newsmast.org – tackling the related issue of discovery in the Fediverse – you need a solution across both server and client, to deliver timelines at speed. So it’s a challenge!
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@laurenshof it's difficult on mobile because either you have to build a reordered timeline on the fly, and fetch potentially hundreds of posts from the remote server to do so (so you're bound by how quickly the remote server can respond, and as you note, can lead to a very slow UI).Or you do it in the background, periodically fetching new posts and maintaining a local timeline. But that can run down the battery.
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