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I’m quite concerned with the puffing up and worship of fediverse based social media systems. They are not immune to greed or enshittification. and it’d be nice to see less “All or nothing” takes.
also, “no algorithms” makes me think that there won’t be a decent way for people to get recommendations based on who they already follow. the point of most algorithms is to show you stuff that might fit your interests based on things you’re already interested in.
To be honest I like that it has no algorithms I don’t want to be told what to see. I want to discover things organically, that and algorithms tend to have an annoying habit of both showing posts out of order and inserting paid posts or similar into feeds, neither of which I want to see.
The only algorithms that there are on mastodon is the social one i.e. people recommending things they truly love and care about and I think that’s great and gets me to check out things more often that a ‘soulless’ bit of code would.
while this is nice for you, it doesn’t work well for a majority of the people who don’t have time to needlessly search and browse eternally.
its a much better way to have all your interests in one place. and its why successful social media platforms have that function.
Addendum: To be clear why it doesn’t have algorithms is because of the previous mentioned points and privacy.
There have been many who have tried to add such features and always we told them we didn’t want something which we cannot explicitly opt-into because many don’t want to be searchable due to harrasment etc.
Depends what you mean by success I suppose.
Mastodon is still going strong despite these supposed inconveniences, so I wouldn’t call it a failure exactly.
I wouldn’t say it’s billionaire proof, one of the devs at least seems in part motivated by money.