Gregory's ServerFound an incredibly useful app for finding people to follow on Mastodon. It crawls your social graph then finds the people who your followers follow the most that you don't follow.
 78 comments
 @carnage4life I am extremely not going to use a data harvesting app made by someone working at Facebook and strongly recommend against it for others.  @Kye fam, the app uses totally public data your instance provides anyone. It doesn’t ask for a token, it doesn’t authenticate with your instance, it won’t work if you/your instance/your follows/their instances hide social graph. It has nothing to do with Facebook or data harvesting. I strongly value privacy and avoiding targeted advertising, but I fear that if you don’t accurately discern what’s a real threat vs harmless, your risk assessment is going to weaken.  @22 @Kye @carnage4life So does every aggregation site. Sorry, not sorry, but enough public data in one spot all sorted out for ease of consumption becomes creepy. I'm with Kye on this one; the whole point of Fedi is organic growth, not algorithmic curation. You've been around long enough to have heard the arguments against this stuff before. Fedi has long resisted scrapers and social graphing because of the abuse potential. The issue is privacy, not security. How has Fediverse tools like Mastodon resisted data aggregation? It seems like it was designed to leverage aggregation as each federated instance is designed to aggregate data of it's accounts. @ericjmorey To un-tag a few people, scrapers are generally frowned upon because they're tools of _3rd party_ aggregation. It's like how you know the people in your own neighborhood, but you wouldn't expect someone from across the country to take an interest in everyone. There's simple aggregation and then there's analysis and curation, which I think is more the implication of an online aggregator these days and maybe a limitation of my language. Data vs. information. @bluestarultor @ericjmorey It aggregates like a phone book, but not like a census. You can find someone in a phone book easy. Connecting them to their family and neighbors is possible, but much, much harder. A census does that connecting. I can follow anyone on Fedi, but tracking that down for dozens to form a social web would make the average person question why I put forth the effort. I don't like that being given at the push of a button. @carnage4life this is a centralizing app. It promotes the winner-take-all internet that drives me batty. All of my top results are overexposed big stars who never respond to a comment, and 5 of the top 6 are white men. I'm using but it requires pickiness! EDIT: I think I figured out how to use this: Start at the bottom of the list. The ones on top are all people you've heard of and if you're not following them, it's probably on purpose. But lower down there are some great finds. Thank you! @carnage4life not sure I need anything 'crawling my social graph', but thanks for being upfront on what it does.  @MdPoppa @carnage4life I don’t know if this stores any data, but worth noting that the info this leverages is already publicly accessible by anyone through public APIs - you’re not giving permission, you’re just telling it who to extract from the available data. @carnage4life added 5 folks to my following list. all interesting, most I follow elsewhere. didn’t get through the whole list of suggestions. @carnage4life It's awesome, I especially like the idea of cherry picking some of the accounts rather than mass adding every account it finds. I'd like to re-examine whatever echo-chamber I'd built up over the years at Twitter.  @carnage4life Wow, no privacy policy, and nothing in the FAQ about why we should trust them with this info? That's kind of alarming, even if the tool promises to be useful. You're not really trusting them with any info that isn't hanging out in public already: "This app uses public APIs to fetch potential people you can follow on Mastodon. In fact, it only does inauthenticated network requests to various Mastodon instances." I'd imagine there are probably lots of people out there trying to scrape various instances and build up giant social graphs of Mastodon users, this one just lets you see your own. @scott @carnage4life the info is already public. You may notice that you don't have to authenticate the app to your instance.  @carnage4life Followgraph suggests that I follow 😱 Brian Morearty because nine people that I follow also follow him. 🤪  @carnage4life works very well though I wish it provided a metric for frequency of posting (ideally over the last 30 days) and maybe an inverse sort. @carnage4life the other problem with this kind of tool is that it is a good way to find your exes and the missing stairs in your groups. @carnage4life I wish it would auto-follow the results or generate a list to import. As of now, you have to click each one! @carnage4life Interesting, but it would be more useful if you could filter by maximum follower count. I'm more interested in finding users with fewer followers but similar interests rather than Mega-Accounts with 10K+ followers. @carnage4life My algorithm for this is following people my followees boost :-) @carnage4life This is one of the coolest things about the Fediverse is folks are constantly creating dohickeys like these to fold into your experience…  @carnage4life I am not the biggest fan of "following the most followed" but I tried it and there were some good suggestions to follow. I think it's fine for when we're reconstructing our social graph, but I also enjoy checking people's profiles randomly to find new folks that aren't necessarily popular between my followings but that post interesting things. :) @carnage4life nuts, I should have released the one I wrote for the bird site a couple years ago. Unfortunately, I wound up having to delete my account because it went haywire and followed so many people that my feed was unusable  @carnage4life I prefer https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/ (as it allows you to migrate your mutes and blocks as well, which seems overly necessary in these current times.) @carnage4life  @carnage4life Attn: @mattblaze — 👆 Try running Followgraph, to find your "follows' follows". May give you some of that news commentary/analysis that you mentioned as missing from this site.   @carnage4life super useful, thanks for sharing! Makes the transition over a lot easier @carnage4life This is great! Just found a bunch of people I used to follow on the birdsite that weren't here when I joined, glad to find them again :)   Why should I follow whose posts get boosted by my follows anyway? (2nd order, sorted by indegree) I'd rather like to know to which largest subgraph I share hashtags with, I don't follow yet. (lowest connectivity, sorted by indegree) @carnage4life @lcparra @cogneurophys #neuroscience 📣 🪭 🧨 Bringing this post back for an encore for no particular reason (turns head, coughs blue feathers). I discovered there were some people I thought I was following, but it turns out, I wasn’t. Handy dandy tool! @carnage4life This discussion may be moot - as of 7/26/23, this no longer seems to return any results. Or possibly mastodon.sdf.org closed off necessary APIs. If so, I think I made the right server choice @carnage4life @asymco Useful but also confirms just how white male centric Mastodon is. Can’t wait for Threads to join the fediverse so I can follow other people.   @carnage4life if you are into #Fediverse tools, you should come give @murmel_social a try. One email a day with the best stories from your timeline (like good old Nuzzel did for Twitter back in the day): https//murmel.social @carnage4life Thank you, this is just what I needed to prioritize efficiently!  @carnage4life Doesn't work for me, at least currently. It does say "try again later as Mastodon may throttle requests" @carnage4life Thank you. It's interesting, useful ... but my rule of thumb: if you don't understand it fully and how it might be misused .... and don't need to use it: leave it out.  @lymphomation @carnage4life Interesting. Not sure what the 9 'errors' I get signify. All but one are 'can't find handle' that one is "Error while retrieving followers for". @carnage4life Sounds like it does for Mastodon what the currated "For You" tab does for #XTwitter. Eek! |
@carnage4life wow, that's neat!