The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won't sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.

Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.

Now, Threads' algorithm is pretty bad, but it's still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I'm not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don't have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.

I'm curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.

Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.

[–] Grimm@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I used the Lists feature like this on Twitter. One of my most popular ones is the “Official Xbox Feed” list that had Xbox employees, developers, and official accounts all in one place. I made it for personal use but it now has 100+ followers.

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