This is great news. Algorithm optimized social networks are poison to society.
If algorithms are are not the default option and are not designed to generate profit for platforms and advertisers, then perhaps they could be a healthy way to discover new content
Also Need to allow some level of user customisability.
I’d run my own frontend aginst the API that ranks a large number of posts from the last 24 hours in terms of personal relevance
Such an algorithm has to run server-side, since it needs access to the full database of content.
It would be possible to allow users to upload their own algorithms (for example via Web Assembly), but I don’t know about any service that allows for that.
Wait, are we calling AI, “algorithms” again?
An algorithm suggesting things you might like doesn’t have to be AI. There are simple metrics to achieve that (e.g. things other people who liked this also liked)
Or are we calling every algorithm AI now?
Bubble sort is now a sentient AI
If (trending) callitai();
People keep calling algorithms AI, so probably
Every social network uses algorithms to show you content. Even mastodon
The Algorithm is such a nebulous term. All programs are algorithms, all it means is a set of unambitious instructions. I don’t think half the people that use it even really know what they mean by it except whatever big tech are doing.
I am kinda sad that the word has now been tainted this way and wish there was another word for a content recommender that’s only goal it to keep users on the platform for as long as possible so as much money as possible can be made from them.
Shall we work on writing the algorithms to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? That’s always a fun one to explain the concept.
That would be a procedure
At that point, you could say that almost all technology does. Even a 1950’s elevator with relay logic runs a (literally hard-wired) algorithm.
We call it AI in 2023 ;)
That’s nice but @tja@sh.itjust.works doesn’t
It’s kind of frustrating because people who don’t understand programming or how the internet works are using algorithm to refer exclusively to the ones used by big tech, with machine learning based on user choices and whatever data they feed it to trick users into staying engaged longer.
Though algorithms are any program or sorting routine, however most people don’t understand this and they just think (even if they’re not willing to tell you) that algorithm just means magic or something like that because they’re imagining the machine learning ones they don’t understand that the simple algorithms like sorting by new or most popular are still algorithms.
Even if that algorithm is simply “sort by date” or “reposted by your followers”
One algo there’s a desperate need for on mastodon is “all the posts by a given user in chronological order but no boosts”
Very much agree, I want to find all their posts but without the boosts, it almost makes me not want to boost things because I worry that people aren’t going to be able to find my post if they want to reply to me.
The most expensive part is probably “not blocked by the user”, which X recently got rid of.
Yeeaaah but you know what he meant. There’s algorithms and then there’s “The Algorithm” in common parlance. IMO it’s the obsession on precision in language that makes otherwise excellent FOSS programmers into terrible proselytizers of FOSS services.
When someone complains about “the algorithm” on Twitter, the correct thing to say is “You should try Mastodon it doesn’t do that” not “Technically all sorting is algorithmic but the sorting on Mastodon is less opaque and more verifiable than that which is commonly employed by Meta Systems Incorporated.”
it’s not profit driven, tho.
I mean I know this is painfully pedantic but even simply sorting by new is algorithmic
The implied difference is if someone or even you know how the algorithm works, which for “new” is relatively straightforward.
Yeah
SELECT TOP(100) * FROM POSTS ORDER BY DATEPOSTED
Is a relatively straight forward command to a database and hell, I’m guessing extremely readable by your average Joe.
If you’re talking SQL, it would be
SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY dateposted LIMIT 100.There are a lot of flavors of SQL each with their own syntax. I’ve been using Microsoft’s SQL now for 3 years and the syntax I used is correct for that.
So is anything a programmable computer does.
When people say algorithms on social media they usually never refer to the simple everyday algorithms that are easy to understand, they always use that word to refer to the proprietary ones designed to feed you content based on machine learning and data fed to them by the company.
Though yes sorting by new, or activity, or even by vote count is still in algorithm, just a much simpler one that almost never employs machine learning.
I’m aware. my comment was more for the folks who don’t know that an algorithm is simply a set of steps to achieve something specific
Yeah exactly, most people understand to some degree that they are being manipulated by ““The Algorithm”” and would like an alternative service. Responding to that sentiment with “actually all sorting is technically algorithmic” is not the way to make a new Mastodon convert.
You say from Lemmy which is algorithm based.
I think “algorithm” refers to personalized sorting and recommendations in this case, so using your data to prioritize posts that keep you on the site. That’s not what any of the Fediverse apps are doing.
Nothing wrong with that. The Masotodon server can pool the popular/trending posts and push them to your feed if it’s relevant, aka if you follow accounts that follow, or follow a hashtag. It already has to access your information to have the feed work at all obviously, personality just means it makes more complicated decisions from the information is already has.
The key difference is whether it does what I told it to do (e.g. gather popular posts with tags I follow) or if it uses my usage data to figure out what would keep me engaged. The former is perfectly fine imo, the latter can become manipulative very quickly.
Well then ask yourself who’s doing the manipulation? The instance owner? The open source devs who make the engagement algo?
The open source devs are going to be in line with keeping it transparent and healthy while still keeping it entertaining, so there’s already checks and balances right there to prevent it becoming an issue. There is no venture capitalists to corrupt it either, so there’s no incentive to make it malicious and the community gets to tweak it to make it balanced. That also means anyone can check to see how it works. Also they can add options for the user to tweak it.
If you don’t like it, then the current option of new posts/boosts in order will always be enabled, so this would be a completely optional separate feed and not affect you if you don’t like it. No need to police others and decide they don’t deserve to have this implemented as an optional sort, and it’s not replacing your current feed.
If a instance somehow maliciously manipulates the algo, then that’s the beauty of decentralization right there, you’re free to swap. The problem with other social media algos is they’re corrupted by venture capitalist and they’re centralized so you have no say in how it works. Both these issues don’t apply to Mastodon.
Interesting idea I had, maybe there might be some merit in allowing experienced users to build their own engagement algorithms for their personal profiles. They could also share their code with others who might want to use it. In that situation nobody’s creating any manipulative algorithms, they’re just doing it for themselves or for each other. They can also tweak it individually to their preferences. Of course since it would definitely require experience it’s more a nice optional thing to have, not a necessity.
I’m not strictly against personalized recommendations (hence why I said it “can” become manipulative), and you’re making some good points. But I do think it’s a very dangerous game to be playing.
It almost certainly requires collecting and storing very personal usage data, and it can influence people’s mood and behaviour depending on what the algorithm is optimizing for (e.g. showing you stuff that makes you angry or ashamed). For that reason I think it’s not just a matter of letting it loose on people. It needs to be very well communicated and explained (e.g. things like “we are showing you this because …”), so people stay in control of their own actions.
Imo it’s a bit like slot machines. Just fine for most people most of the time, but it can drag you down a dark path if you’re vulnerable for whatever reason.
This is an amazing sign. Governments joining a particular social media is an underrated sign of platform success. People want to reach and hear from their government officials. I don’t think it will be long before this will no longer be big news
Hopefully it spreads throughout the German government
The German state already has its own instance (social.bund.de). Our federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information already recommended our chancellor to switch to Mastodon, but he declines every time and his office insists on putting screenshots of his tweets on their website.
Five German State Parliaments are on Mastodon:
@ltrlp@social.bund.de
@LT_Nds@social.bund.de
@thueringerlandtag@social.bund.de
@BayerischerLandtag@social.bund.de
@HessischerLandtag@social.bund.de
Six:
Baden-Würtemberg
So, 37.5% of all states. Still wondering why it takes so long for the other ones to move or at least open an account on mastodon.There are also some accounts for state governments, but it seems only three so far:
The others are probably still busy installing the fax-to-toot gateways.
Seven: https://social.bund.de/@HBBuergerschaft and also the federal parliament: https://social.bund.de/@hib_Nachrichten
In the case of the SH instance the government seems to be the only user, while on social.bund.de you’ll find a flurry of different stuff, both state and federal level, say the federal weather service, unsurprisingly quite popular. I’m actually quite surprised Bavaria of all states is using the federal instance.
Instance choice is going to be complicated with some SH institutions because on the one hand we’re just as much as a “state’s rights and sovereignty” state as Bavaria (pretty much the only thing we have in common short of agriculture), but OTOH share quite a few with Hamburg, say, statistics.
These things are never as easy as “just open an account” when it comes to states.
Hey, I just started using Mastodon and my experience for now is a bit mixed. I must be doing something wrong.
I don’t follow people yet but only subjects (#). Thing is, my feed isn’t really interesting. I come across german, asian, spanish posts (I’m looking for french and english content) and the vast majority of them isn’t “retweeted” (boosted ?) or even “liked”. Most aren’t interesting to be quite honest and I don’t like browsing my feed. Would love to know what do I do wrong !
Unlike Twitter, hashtags don’t perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it’s federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don’t share your interests.
If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.
In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it’s more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that’s just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don’t have a basis for comparison. :-)
Is there no way to search hash tags across all instances at all? It seems like someone should figure that out. The ui has that connotation given how search works historically on other sites.
On a federated server system layout, that search would be tremendously computationally/network intensive as it would require somehow finding out all instances and communities within each instance and repolling the servers to get that info periodically to ensure the list is updated. A better approach would be an app (on your mobile or hosted somewhere) that would maintain a list of servers and would do that query outside of the servers that handle conversations.
Although search on a federated system seems to be almost impossible to implement at this point, I think it is a crucial step in taking back the web.
What I mean with this is: most of the people that are on the Fediverse right now seem to look very fondly on the World Wide Web as it was a decade ago. Before Social Media became gated communities, support for RSS was dropped everywhere, corporations found out that the web could be used for advertisements and tracking mechanisms were implemented.
Reddit has - until this summer - been a corner of the web where some of us still found valuable information and held discussions with real people. Back in the good old days we had homepages and blogs that we subscribed to and searched through. On Reddit we had our subreddits.
When I was looking for a discussion on a niche topic (or even honest product experience) I used
my search term site:reddit.comon Google all the time. This basically meant: I’m only concerned for the part of the World Wide Web that is reddit.com and not deluted by corporate / seo / influencer bullshit.With the Fediverse hopefully taking Reddit’s place, how do we go on from here? How do we narrow down our search scope to the useful part of the web nowadays?
Is this true? I mostly subscribe to hashtags but definitely see a lot of content from outside my instance based on the hashtag alone. Is it something that instance admins can make happen with certain other instances or something?
I thought the whole point of the fediverse thing was data could be shared between instances like it works on Lemmy where you see things from all over the fediverse in your feed. I’m super new to this whole thing though so I don’t really know.
To clarify, it is not that you won’t see content from other instances, it is that your instance only stores content from another instance when someone on your instance has subscribed to it. So if you decided to subscribe to a bunch of things on other instances with hashtags matching your interests, then you and other people would start to see this content showing up when searching for the hashtag on your instance.
Ohhhh gotcha, appreciate the clarification, thanks!
You have to build your own algorithm. I follow a lot of artists who have moved over. You can also search the handle of a lot of larger Twitter channels - there’s a bot that pulls content over from them in some cases.
Yup, I found some of those bots and they’re quite useful. I’ll try to find more. I’d also love to follow artists but I don’t know how to find out who moved on Mastodon. Guess I’ll type a bunch of names.
It takes time. Twitter (or whatever it wants to be called) has an algorithm expressly aimed at keeping you “engaged”, whereas Mastodon is just a stream of toots which you see based on the time you decide to visit. Should you stick with it, eventually two things will happen:
- You will find accounts and topic to follow which will fill your timeline with content that is relevant and interesting to you, and, perhaps more importantly
- Your mind will give up the habit of being hooked on a social media stream (apologies if I’m implying something that isn’t true for you - it certainly was for me).
In the end, maybe you decide it’s not for you, but I’ve been using it for years (since 2017), and over time it’s completely replaced Twitter for me. I’m keeping three accounts for different interests (and one on Pixelfed), logged into all of them using Fedilab. I actually deleted my Twitter account the day the Tucker/Tate interview hit the light of day, but I stopped actively visiting it years earlier. My mental state improved a lot over time since I moved on.
I think the lack of an algorithm to keep you engaged is what makes it better than Xwitter, and the main reason why I have a mastodon account, but I never had (nor ever will have) an account on Txitter.
Thanks for your message. I’ll keep trying, you guys gave me a lot a useful tips.
Hashtags are a thing but you need to find people to follow who are boosting others post.
The most important is to find groups about your interests. Groups are accounts to follow who will boost every post mentioning it. This will help you to find interesting account to follow.
Boosting is important has it’s how people discover new content.
I’m sorry you haven’t had a great experience. Mastodon has been my go-to for archaeology news since leaving Reddit and it tends to have a lot less bullshit and pseudoscience right now, which I just love.
That’s nice ! I’m sure I need to get used to it a bit more, that’s why I didn’t give up yet. It’s been less than a week for mo it’d be a bit foolish to stop trying now.
I hope it improves for you.
Find interesting people in those hashtags and follow them. Not everyone posts using hashtags everytime so you’re very likely missing on a lot of interesting content. Also, if your local feed (the one where you see posts from people on your own instance) is not of your interest you may want to migrate to another more specific or general, depending on your choice.
Thanks a lot, I’ll try that !
my masto experience so far (starting fall last year):
1st instance: everything goes well, got a small, but nice following. at some point i find out - by accident - that i’m shadowbanned. contact support, they told me that someone complained about something and to appease them, they muted my posts from the instances public timeline (“account was not suspended because no rules were broken”) without even telling me. they refuse to this day to tell my what i posted to trigger this. deleted my account after this.
2nd instance: after one (!) day a zerg army of right wing weirdos started to spam my mentions, calling me a “fed” and other well known slurs because i posted something they didn’t agree with. deleted my account after this.
meanwhile i still have my 700 followers on twitter and for some reason no one shadowbanned me or tried to bully me away. guess i should just open my own instance :^)
It’s just a matter of following a lot of interesting people since it has no “recommendation algorithm” or whatever. But that can be hard I guess.
I am also more into the reddit/lemmy approach of social media where you subscribe to a community rather than following individual people so idk.
That’s just mastodon for you, since it has no algo. You’ll get gaslighted into being told this is good despite being continued to be bored. Unfortunately what you described is the Mastodon experience currently.
I think the value in Mastodon rn is getting away from the algo. I think the lack of one does limit its marketability though. I never really liked Twitter but I know a lot of people who do who hate mastodon because of how complicated it feels and the lack of content.
I never felt it was too complicated, though the people unfamiliar with decentralization definitely get confused by the process of on boarding. The lack of content is still the issue for a lot of reasons. Mastodon’s search is straight up broken. Also it doesn’t show federations of users you’re following, it can definitely extend it’s social graph a lot more. They intentionally nerf it for dumb reasons thinking it somehow marginalizes people, it makes no sense.
Lemmy does do this and is why it feels a lot more exciting on Lemmy. It’s also why I pretty much abandoned Mastodon since most of my time is on Lemmy at this point.
Hm, that’s too bad. Though it shows the incredible powers those algorithms have. Mastodon has been utterly bland for me but I’m not ready to give up yet.
You got to follow a bunch of people before it starts to feel worthwhile, see if anybody you know from outside of Mastodon has a profile there, or open up different instances and check out people there.
If you want you can even follow people and Communities (though on Mastodon they’re called groups) from Lemmy and reply to them from Mastodon (it is a little bit clunky).
Though for best results you should try and follow people on Mastodon or similar federated microblogging platforms, since people who they follow also have a chance of showing up in your feed.
Yeah, I found out Lemmy and Mastodon are somehow related (when I, for example, came across my own Lemmy account on Mastodon).
Thanks for the tips
I feel it is a bit of a reality check in that most people actually just post mundane stuff, while certain other sites purposely promote all the rage bait and controversial topics instead, which somewhat distorts your potential world view.
The lack of an algo, is exactly why it’s good. It won’t try to turn you into a zombie (= it’s not designed to keep you hooked).
I have the exact opposite experience and get overwhelmed by the number of notification I get on it.
The issue is people thinking Mastodon is Twitter bis. It’s not. You need to understand the philosophy behind it.
The EU itself also has a Mastodon instance with the funny, overly clear name of https://social.network.europa.eu/
But only the institutions of EU, not for EU residents.
I like this idea because it becomes very easy to verify authenticity especially now that verification badges on X is just subscription badges without verification. You simply set up a subdomain of the form social.country.tld (much like the German parliament did) and you’ll know forename.surname@social.country.tld is an authentic representative for a political party or whatever. No money involved other than running the instance, which will be a tiny cost for something as niche as one offering a voice for the parliament alone.
So I hope this takes off even more around the world. It is certainly a more democratic way to do social than paying some dude in America that runs his personal garden to have badges.
Cool! Now dozens of people will get their posts!
The more important thing: anyone can see their posts now. This is rather crucial for a government institution’s feed and not true on Twitter anymore.
This - Twitter is currently not usable without an account. You can’t see any posts and there’s no way to ensure that your followers will see your posts. Therefore it’s really useless as a communication channel for government information.
They don’t share anything important on there anyway.
A dozen today, 13 tomorrow, eventually more people will know about it and join. You don’t have to go that far back for governments having any social media presence at all being a very weird thing.
They already have 1.6k followers.
As of now, accounts of their instance have thousands of followers.
That’s really good news. I hope all governments will do the same. Right now, I only use Twitter to receive notifications from government agencies.
The Dutch government also launched their own mastodon instance recently at social.overheid.nl. Several government departments have already joined. I hope politicians will also make the move, although I do not know if this specific instance allows for accounts other than those of government departments.
When you make public announcements as a politician or political party, it should be done via a channel that can be accessed without registration!
DIE PALZ!
In my terrible attempt and translating to German… “einer von uns, einer von uns, einer von uns”!
Thats translation is actually perfectly fine
Good, fuck Twitter, that fucking piece of shit platform. Fuck Elon Musk too.
And no, I’m not calling it X, or whatever bullshit name they come up with next.
Obligatory fuck Phoney Stark.
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They have their own instance. That’s their own website.
Sure, you can subscribe to them. But that’s different from being the the algorithmic soup that is Twitter.
Well checking it up they don’t actually have their own instance. Instead they arranged an account on the social.bund.de instance, which is run by the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI) for purpose of offering official accounts to german governmental entities.
What makes it still “less likely something bad is right next to them” is exactly, that only government official and officials can get accounts on that instance and is for official use only. So thus it’s a sterile controlled instance.
I’m sure they could have also spun their own instance, but well bund.de service was already running one anyway so just hop on that band wagon.
I think this will become a more common thing. Governments run a national “official business” instance, where there is only official communications accounts of various government bodies and goverment officers (The official account of the office of the Presidency of the country, the official account of the Prime minister of the country and so on).
Thanks for the extra details 👍.
I look forward to there being lots of unique instances for different applications over time.
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The way Matstodon works makes it a very different animal. Just recently they started rolling out more robust search too, so it’s continuing to improve.
You can even follow lemmy with Mastodon if you choose too. Depending on your client, and what you follow, it might be noisy to do so though!
Another cool advantage of a organization or government hosting their own instance is that every user gets
name@official-url.tldso no one can impersonate them. No blue check mark systems required.But Mastodon also has a simple system to verify an account by linking a profile to a website too.
Anyway, I’m just doing a nerdy info-dump now. I’ll leave it at that.
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Haha I think they might be talking of how Mastodon doesn’t insert ads or bought posts right next to your own posts, so a professional institution like a parliament no longer risks having erection pills or a crypto ad that fakes association with a celebrity next to a post by a political party leader.
I’ve been on Mastodon for awhile now. It’s decent, but it’s desperately needs an algo despite what the long term people on there think, while simultaneously wondering why it keeps failing to catch on. Also the community on there is incredibly boring.
Also the community on there is incredibly boring.
but not you right
Of course it’s boring, on most instances you‘ll get nuked by some powertripping admin for posting something remotely interesting outside their mental safe zone, so everyone plays it safe.
Keep chasing that dragon.
pls don’t kill my high.
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Well I finally did get an invite to Bluesky, so I’m using that… Just need it to open for more people, because shit is barren right now. Let’s hope either that or Mastodon blow up soon. I’ve really been enjoying Bluesky, the layout is so similar to Twitter.
BlueSky is for-profit, not decentralized, the CEO is a crypto fanatic and Jack Dorsey sits on the board. It is literally just Twitter 2 if not worse.
Which is a shame, because the AT Protocol does look interesting on a technical level…
