As much as some old school Fediverse denizens don't like it, one of the reasons people enjoy social media is a chance to follow entertainers, educators, activists, and all sorts of people who reliably and frequently post good things to read. In following these accounts, there's not necessarily any intention of being buddies with these posters; their content is consumed as entertainment and/or enrichment.
It's not unreasonable for someone to want to be able to find that sort of appealing content here on the Fediverse. Hence the question, "Who's good to follow?" I think this is the primary thing being referred to when people say it's hard to find people on the Fediverse without an algorithm; I suspect when people say it's hard to discover people on the Fediverse without an algorithm, this is the use case they have in mind, with finding a scene the secondary use case.
4/n
@kissane
So given these five very different meanings of "finding people on the Fediverse", it's not entirely clear which of them your respondents are complaining of difficulty with. Maybe all of them - I honestly think that Mastodon and clones are bad at all five.
It seems obvious to me that these five different senses of "How do you find people here?" refer to very different problems,
requiring very different solutions. An algorithm isn't going to find your friends for you; a Twitter to Federverse user mapping service isn't going to help you to find cool new content; search is probably not actually going to help you surface people you would like to become friends with.
It would be interesting to surface which of these things people are bouncing off of hardest, not least because it reveals what desires people are bringing to the Fediverse, and finding that the Fediverse doesn't support (or doesn't seem to, or does so erratically.)
5/5
@kissane
So given these five very different meanings of "finding people on the Fediverse", it's not entirely clear which of them your respondents are complaining of difficulty with. Maybe all of them - I honestly think that Mastodon and clones are bad at all five.
It seems obvious to me that these five different senses of "How do you find people here?" refer to very different problems,
requiring very different solutions. An algorithm isn't going to find your friends for you; a Twitter to Federverse...