#feditips

a lot of time you will hear things like “there’s no algorithm here” and “you are your own algorithm”. these are fundamentally unhelpful, as they explain the technological background but not the practical differences, so let’s break this down.

what does a social media #algorithm do? mainly 3 things.

*1. it prevents you from ending up with an empty home timeline when you first sign up. meanwhile, mastodon and many other fedi tools just put you on an empty screen.

*2. when you have run out of new posts in your curated timeline, an algorithm adds additional content. now, how does it do that?

*3. it observes the kinds of posts you interact with, what accounts you follow, who they interact with, etc. to calculate your interests, with some nasty side effects such as amplifying controversy.

so when people say “you are your own algorithm”, they mean that step 3 is what you need to do in order to achieve 1 and 2.

find out what kinds of posts you like and follow those people and hashtags. seek out groups (yes, we have groups!) and follow them, too.

scan local and federated timelines for good stuff. browse other servers’ local timelines.

check out the people getting boosted and linked into your feed and see if they are worth following, because clearly your friends like them! click on random strangers commenting in a thread. you can be sure they aren’t nazis.

instead of training an algorithm to recognise your interests, and training YOURSELF to adapt your behaviour for controlling the algorithm, you need to manually populate your timeline. the trade-off is you are free to interact in any way you like. no unaccountable machine will interpret your criticism as recommendation. no data siphon is analysing your posts for hints on what to try to sell you.

it’s nice, but it does take more initial effort.