Incidentally, I just saw someone singing the praises of mastodon because it forces people to form “authentic connections” as if they don’t their feeds will be empty. Thing they get wrong is that people will follow random strangers that seem interesting in order to fill their feeds. There’s no authentic connection to it at all. And then you get stuck with an unmanageable feed of random stuff from people you don’t know. But this is the myth or affectation of mastodon … that it’s all authentic and real friendships when it’s just social media.

@Coelacanth @maegul I agree with the need for this and I think there has to be a way of doing it given mastodon’s non profit motives, something we can configure, something that works with recommendations and can turn off if we want unlike other platforms that see algorithms as the centre of their business model. Whether mastodon eventually does or it has to be done by an offshoot/successor I don’t know