If we had an open source algorithm for Mastodon/Pixelfed that learned based on the words in the post and image/video we could have a Following + For You feed that showed you all the posts from people you follow and you could choose to see, say, 1 recommended For You post after every 3 posts from your Following feed. With the option to disable For You posts completely or tweak how often you see these.
Discovering new people to follow on mastodon/pixelfed isn’t great (hashtags are rarely used and make posts look ugly) so I still occasionally use twitter because I often discover new indie animators/gamedevs showing off their project making it really nice to browse the For You feed.
This and the way Mastodon handles likes/favorites are the biggest things holding them back right now, IMO. People don’t want to bother with a social media they actually have to put in the work to curate themselves, hell the algorithm is one of the main reasons why TikTok is so successful. Also, by having favorites (which is… weird and confusing? Just call it “likes”, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here). Not only do people get confused between favoriting something and bookmarking something, but since it’s only counting the favorites from your instance, it makes it look like posts are getting barely any interaction, giving this “screaming into the void” feeling that will cause a lot of users to lose interest. The number of
likesfavorites needs to be cumulative across instances.You’re 100% right. The people who are already on these platforms are the ones that don’t like any algorithm at all, so they tend to be combative about its implementation. I don’t think there will be mainstream appeal until it is easy and fun to use for the average person