Gregory's ServerOne of the things that's made it easy to find communities whose discussion I want to see is the linear feed. This is a stark contrast to new social apps I've tried, e.g., Clubhouse, where my feed is dominated by high engagement stuff I don't want.
I understand why companies push that stuff; looking at Twitter's experiments, you get more growth/$ when you switch users who've chosen linear timeline back to ranked timeline.
Fundamentally, this is why most apps don't even offer linear timeline.
At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.
The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.