this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Yep, discovery is still a major pain point for pretty much every Fediverse platform. Probably the biggest issue the Fediverse faces right now, IMO.
Part of it is due to technical limitations due to the way ActivityPub/federation in general works. But another big part of it is (what feels to me like) a stubborn aversion to convenience, a trend I see a lot in FOSS dev communities. When you have devs that would be content reading a news feed off of a .TXT file passed to them on a 5" floppy, and users who want features on their platform, you end up with the situation we're in, where it's impossible to convince the mainstream user to migrate. If the mainstream user doesn't already know who is even on the platform in order to follow them, and has no effort-free way of discovering accounts to follow, they're not going to stick around. Especially when on just about any Mastodon server you join, your local/global feeds are almost all politics and high-level tech discussion.
I think that the average user would be supportive of FOSS and the Fediverse in general, and probably likes the idea of a non-corpo platform where they have more control over their feeds and their content. But I feel that it's not worth trading away discovery or "algorithmic" tools for most users.
I think if Mastodon (or a Mastodon-adjascent platform like Misskey or Pleroma) could find a way to develop an algorithmic recommendation engine that respects user privacy (perhaps basing recommendations on a file stored on the user's account, which they can modify/backup at will), we could see a sizable increase in Fedi users.
There's a major section of mastodon users who like mastodon because it doesn't have any recommendation algorithms. Both from the side of "I don't want to be told what to click on" and the "I don't want an algorithm surfacing my posts in a way I'm not in complete control of"
This might curse it to forever be the platform with the smaller number of users, but the nice thing about activitypub is that there may be other services/clients that will be willing to take up that mantle for those that want it.
Couldn't there be an implementation thay leaves everyone satisfied?
Sort of like implementating a new optional tab for discovery and allowing users to choose whether their posts appear on it. The implementation should of course be fully honest without dark patterns, though due to the lack of profit incentive it shouldn't be difficult to achieve a satisfying implementation.
I don't think it would last long as a clean implementation.
The problem with having a completely open algorithm for discovery, you give spammers an instruction manual for how to consistently get to the top of the rankings.
Eventually these systems would always get abused and become completely filled with useless nonsense.
An alternative is to have the discovery completely exist on the client side, but I'm not sure how that would even work given the way activitypub works.
Personally I think any social media recommendation/discovery system is a dark pattern.
As a perpetually overloaded autistic person, yes please.
Seriously - something like federated Hotline would be so cool. Distributed - even better, of course.
OK, dreaming.
I'd want the floppy disc to be a standard size though. You can't just chop a ¼" off like that. It won't work.