The new For You feed now won’t just showcase a range of popular, but diverse, accounts, but will customize its suggestions based on the user’s own “friends of friends” network. That means the content from public accounts that friends of friends follow will be surfaced in the new For You feed. - Techcrunch
Doesnt seem to be active yet, looks like that feature is still closed beta.
I really hope they include an option to customize the For You feed. I don’t want pure recommendations I want a chronological feed with every 3rd post be a recommended one. I don’t understand how zero platforms/apps have a merged feed to have the best of both in one feed
We don’t want you on Mastodon. I don’t mean to offend you, but Mastodon is the way it is. The lack of “smart” feed is a feature. It might be not for you.
I know it’s a feature, and I know people on Mastodon care about it. And because of that it’s not for me. That’s fine. My point was, exactly because Mastodon is not for everyone, there’s no need to be derisive of the people who “flock to yet another corporate social media honeypot.”
Absolutely! The feed isn’t a random mishmash. The natural order in which people post gives the Mastodon feed a very organic feeling. And there is no doom scrolling. You eventually hit the point where you left it last time and there’s nothing more to see. Contrary to how it sounds, it gives you a feeling of satisfaction and closure. Honestly, the algorithmic feeds have done great psychological harm.
You want a corporate entity to recommend things to you based on a closed algorithm you have no control over?
Each to their own and I know a lot of people do it, but that’s really weird to me, absolutely crazy.
In any case, it’s open source so you could probably hire someone to develop that for you if you really wanted. You know, have it serve things up to you that manipulates you to stay on the platform while best aligning with their corporate interests. You do you.
No, I want a communal, collaboratively managed platform to recommend things to me based on an open source algorithm whose behavior I can adjust the way I want. Alas, this just isn’t a thing.
Just amongst the available options, the closed algorithm optimized for engagement has so far been better at showing me interesting things than an unfiltered chronological feed.
Fair, and if I was a little harsh there I apologise. It’s not a thing, and in absence of that the best thing to use is Mastodon which while doesn’t provide recommendations the way you want but at least doesn’t provide recommendations that are biased against your interests.
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