> Features on the long-term roadmap:
> “Since you were gone” optional algorithmic timeline
That's exciting! The fediverse is severely lacking algorithmic curation presumably due to the belief that it's inherently evil (I'd strongly disagree; it's merely the algorithm not being user-controllable what's bad).
Fully agree, the algorithmic timeline (sprinkling in some likes and comments from other people that might be interesting to you) is one of Twitters best features even if many people (who mostly use third party clients for that reason) would not agree.
Do you people know that "# Explore" section on the right of Mastodon already lists posts which are gaining traction? It also lists news which are trending.
It says:
"These posts from this and other servers in the decentralized network are gaining traction on this server right now."
I don't know what the logic is, but on big servers it's listing a lot of content.
That's very different from the Twitter timeline though, which shows you "good" content from people you already follow that happened since the last time you used Twitter. So if you refresh a bunch of times you'll always see more interesting tweets / likes / comments.
Yes you are right, but IMO it's algorithmic curation already, like the parent said. It's just not from your timeline but from whole fediverse / server you are on.
It's probably not that difficult to add one based on your feed if there is one globalized already.
To me, the main difference to Twitter seems to be that you have to explicitly go to the "Explore" section to look for trending content, leaving your "default" home timeline chronological.
So if you want to check out what's the current buzz, you can, but you won't unknowingly be missing posts from those you follow (which seems to be the common complaint on Twitter).
The word "algorithm" has suffered wild semantic drift at the hands of journalists. Let's see if we can start to fix that now by making sure that on HN and in adjacent communities of all places we use the appropriate words for the thing we are talking about.
We are talking about heuristics here, not algorithms.
That's exciting! The fediverse is severely lacking algorithmic curation presumably due to the belief that it's inherently evil (I'd strongly disagree; it's merely the algorithm not being user-controllable what's bad).