I believe in: Black liberation, Land Back, sex worker rights, fat love, anti-psychiatry, disability justice, climate justice, environmental restoration, police abolition, a better future for all of us.
always open to constructive criticism, requests and chats. DO NOT give me unsolicited advice.
you never know what kind of stuff you may rediscover by staring at the filenames rushing by
i just found a directory of files long believed lost. past me did not delete them, as it turns out. past me stuck them in a hidden directory. i am crying a little
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.
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.
@skye yeahh most algorithms do their best to hide me and then there's Tumblr which will go "you and X person you've never interacted with share a marginalized group! So obviously you'll love how they're bigoted against another one!" And YouTube which will go "well you're clearly interested in a lot of different creative pursuits so I'm done even trying to find things specific to your interests, here's some random white guy talking about topics you've never watched videos about"
@skye the other part of this missing algorithm is the display order, ie that feeds are all chronological, not optimized at all for most interaction or anything. If anything it was what took the most time to get used to for me
@skye WRONG! The fediverse and all mastodon clients are driven by algorithms. The difference to surveillance capitalism: our algorithms are easy and open source and not optimized for advertising.
stop behaviour: telling random people you’ve never interacted with before to caption their images
replace with behaviour: replying to their post with an image description
advantages: not hostile towards people legitimately unable to caption; sufficiently annoying for the others but impossible to criticise; provides immediate value to people struggling to make sense of the picture; provides an example for what a caption should look like for those who are new to the feature
@skye Several blind folks on Tw*tter explained it's rather impossible for them to find image descriptions hidden in replies. It may work if OP replies to their own tweet, and thus creating a thread. But it doesn't work well with random replies from other people.
@skye TIL I'm trans.
@skye rust: you want to do C but you only know jquery and you want to blame crashes on the language.
C: you want to actually know what the computer is doing with its time.