Mastodon: Our ideas about Packs
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Seems like a good idea, although a simple, configurable algorithm would also be nice.
You select one or several topics, and it shows you popular posts in that category.
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Seems like a good idea, although a simple, configurable algorithm would also be nice.
You select one or several topics, and it shows you popular posts in that category.
I guess in a way that's what it offers, just that instead of an algorithm it's human curated. Mastodon is a lot about boosts, so following someone doesn't mean just following them, but also being subjected to whatever they boost (unless you silence their boosts of course). So if you're interested in pottery and you follow a pottery starter pack, chances are that feed will end up a curated channel of pottery content.
The great thing is that it has quality control and cannot be abused the same way algorithmic feeds always end up being. The funky thing is, of course, that you also end up being exposed to everything else those people are interested in. But I think that's part of what makes Mastodon feels so nice.
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i would use it - I suck at finding stuff on mastodon
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Congratulations, you've been included in the "Assholes" pack.
If you wish to be removed from the pack, you must write a letter explaining why we should remove you and mail it to the address listed below with an attached blood sample in a crystal vial packaged in a refrigerated container with proper padding fit for shipping.
Mastodon Inc,
228 East 45th Street Suite 9E
New York, New York 10017::: spoiler Spoiler
Disclaimer: this is a joke not intended to convey anything.
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I guess in a way that's what it offers, just that instead of an algorithm it's human curated. Mastodon is a lot about boosts, so following someone doesn't mean just following them, but also being subjected to whatever they boost (unless you silence their boosts of course). So if you're interested in pottery and you follow a pottery starter pack, chances are that feed will end up a curated channel of pottery content.
The great thing is that it has quality control and cannot be abused the same way algorithmic feeds always end up being. The funky thing is, of course, that you also end up being exposed to everything else those people are interested in. But I think that's part of what makes Mastodon feels so nice.
I see what you mean, but it's never worked as well for me as a simple, well designed algorithm or even bsluesky feeds, or, incidentally, lemmy communities.
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Bluesky pioneered a brilliant solution to this “empty feed problem” in 2024, with the introduction of “Starter Packs”, a feature that allows users to curate and share their own collections of recommended accounts.
Bluesky pioneered, eh? I distinctly remember using a feature called "circles" on Google+ back in 2011. It allowed people to create arbitrary "circles" of people, share them and have others bulk-follow/unfollow the people from a circle. It worked incredibly well and Google+ became a lively social network even with its small userbase at the time.
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Seems like a good idea, although a simple, configurable algorithm would also be nice.
You select one or several topics, and it shows you popular posts in that category.
I wish there was something like this for tags. So: display only posts that contain tag X, but sort them with some algorithm. Ideally: steered by number of likes and date of adding. May be even the same that is used by Lemmy.
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I wish there was something like this for tags. So: display only posts that contain tag X, but sort them with some algorithm. Ideally: steered by number of likes and date of adding. May be even the same that is used by Lemmy.
That's what I want, it could be implemented like bluesky feeds, where you choose the tags and words you want included, and then choose what kind of ordering you want!
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i would use it - I suck at finding stuff on mastodon
Following Trendy Toots bot made my mastodon experience much better: https://mastodon.social/@trendytoots
It just retoots popular posts, similar to hot thread but chronological.
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I really don't understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don't use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.
On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it's often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.
Instead I'd like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.
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FYI all the Mastodon team is looking for feedback on featured collections (aka "starter packs") so they may check in on this post 🙂
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FYI all the Mastodon team is looking for feedback on featured collections (aka "starter packs") so they may check in on this post 🙂
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@anna @adrienne @eniko @mcc all the records in your PDS contain references to your identity (DID document), it's theoretically possible to modify the data to change that but requires rewriting your entire PDS for that account, so not particularly practical.
It's the DID that is moderated against in the higher layers, not your handle.
So it doesn't matter if you're @fred.example or @jason.example, if the DID used for one becomes the DID used for another handle.
It's kinda like how on ActivityPub, software has often encoded your username into the identifier for all your posts, meaning you can't change it without breaking everything.
(Though Mastodon is starting to fix this long-standing issue, there's fix only applies on new accounts, there's no protocol level way to fix it yet — it's kinda a weakness in JSON-LD)
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@mcc yeah have a look at Rudy's thread there, he makes that very clear. And similarly Northsky is saying well, our original plan was do PDS as Phase 1, Relay as Phase 2, and AppView as Phase 3, but now we're acceslerating Relay and AppView up and treating it all as Phase 1. My take is that everybody always took the approach of treating Bluesky PBC as a potential adversary but didn't expect them to be this adversarialy this quickly.
(If this is all an N-dimensional chess play to blow up the company to speed up the decentralization ... well as shitposting goes, that's pretty darned epic. But it's probably just horrbile comms accelerating and magnifying the tensions that were always inherent. Time will tell I guess.)
@by_caballero it's true that's a huge hole in the composable moderation model (and Rudy and others had been looking at it even before this -- https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/how-should-we-fairly-split-the-costs-of-commons-moderation-across-producer-and-consumer-apps/122 is interesting thinking from the Eurosky perspective although doesn't yet point to any conclusions). But for this particular case they just need an appeal method for community members that allows themm to override the Bluesky mod service's app-level takedowns in their own AppView. On the deeper issue though I feel pretty vindicated because I've always said that composable moderation is interesting and valuable in some important use cases but doesn't actually solve the moderation scalability issue.
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@mcc @jdp23 here guys this might help clarify why Rudy has to rearrange his epics in jira:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3m2j6ccx2bs2t
moderation can only be additive until/unless you pony up the CSAM/hashmatch API key money plus roll and run yr own mod sys at scale. thats the real Achilles heel of composable moderation-- replacing the bottom layer is incredibly expensive
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@adrienne @eniko @mcc one thing i was never clear on, if you have your own pds and get permad, can you migrate and get around the perma, or is it some kind of cryptographic seed/hash of your pds data that's perma'd so you're fucked?
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@eniko @mcc if you're on your own PDS, you at least don't lose all your existing posts if bsky decides to permaban you. (If you're on one of their mushroom PDSes, they'll nuke all your content along with a permaban.)
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I really don't understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don't use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.
On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it's often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.
Instead I'd like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.
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@jdp23 What's interesting to me here is, the bluesky line is "ha ha it's super good everyone is angry at us because it accelerates federation", but you're making it sound like Rudy is having to upend his software engineering schedule to do stuff he otherwise wouldn't have had to do at all early, because of this incident forcing him to protect his users
