What I meant is that I want algorithm suggested content come to me automatically like it happens in Twitter or Reddit.
In Reddit, you can sub to r/math and r/programming with a single account and have content appear on your feed.
In Mastodon, I need to explicitly follow accounts from other instances and get the content they post, or repost.
This is very bad to me.
In FB there are groups, in Twitter, you just follow people, in Reddit there are subs. And entire different instants for different communities? Nah I simply don't like it.
I want to be able to follow whole _instances_ rather than follow people from instances.
(PS: I do understand federation, and have merged code PRs in multiple fediverse-related repos.)
Algorithmic content promotion is fundamentally antithetical to Mastodon's intent, as well as most other Fediverse systems:
You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.
This doesn't mean that someone couldn't create an algorithmic Fediverse server, which would ingest a large number of feeds and then specifically surface particular posts and/or profiles to people. It's just that that's not the present project's philosophy, and you'd probably find any such instance defederated by most other instances.
There are a few ways you can follow topical rather than profile-based content, and several others may be emerging.
- Mastodon has recently enabled subscribing to hashtags. So long as others are tagging content reliably, you can see discussion on a specific topic, either in its own stream (as a pinned Hashtag) or within your Home stream.
- There are several group-based services, with gup.pe (<https://a.gup.pe/>) which allow people to subscribe to a feed on a specific theme or topic. You follow the group, and post specific topics to that group --- the overall function is much like a mailing list. Chirp.social and Qoto are similar services.
In Reddit, you can sub to r/math and r/programming with a single account and have content appear on your feed.
In Mastodon, I need to explicitly follow accounts from other instances and get the content they post, or repost.
This is very bad to me.
In FB there are groups, in Twitter, you just follow people, in Reddit there are subs. And entire different instants for different communities? Nah I simply don't like it.
I want to be able to follow whole _instances_ rather than follow people from instances.
(PS: I do understand federation, and have merged code PRs in multiple fediverse-related repos.)