I think a big problem behind the reluctance of alternatives to the strictly chronical timeline on Mastodon is that people fear that too much power is taken out of their hands if they are introduced. But the fact is: it is already the case that we put a lot of trust in administrators to put the correct software in place. A strictly chronological timeline makes one thing less to worry about but basically, it only reduces the symptom of the problem. Instead, I think the real problem needs to be faced: take away the fear of users that their instances are not working as they are supposed to and give them the power to check themselves whether the instances they are on are actually doing what they subscribed to.
As the most important, I think of the following two:
- Defederation Tool: shows from which other instances your own instance defederated (I think that already exists).
- Timeline tool: is the timeline curated based on the algorithm the instance proposed.
If these are in place, you could check that you see the right posts by the right instances, which is already a nice thing to know to begin with and would at least me quite content for introducing custom timelines and thereby giving more power to the admins. And with the mentality of this being an important issue, there would always be someone trying to see if an instance is run as promised and most admins wouldn’t bother trying to do bad things.
Additionally, the algorithms would need to be determinstic and data collected by the instance about the user downloadable.
PS: Of course admins are doing a great job here, also given that most of them are volunteers. I’m not saying they are bad people, I’m just saying there need to be tools to control what they are doing if more powerful tools will be introduced to them in the future like custom timelines.
I would agree to algorithm-generated timelines if I could opt-out of them and not have them turned on behind my back like what happened constantly with Facebook (to the point I had to use a browser plug-in to force the feed I wanted!) and Twitter. If other people want to abrogate their own responsibility to curate their own world for the ease of letting someone else decide what goes before their eyes, that’s no skin off my nose. It becomes a problem only when that’s forced on me.
The problem is, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the corporate “social” media platforms, algorithms will eventually be turned on by default with no way to turn them off. The only rational path, to my mind, is to never turn them on in the first place.
There would be no reason for a non-commercial site to forcibly turn them on, especially in an environment with the relative ease of moving that the Fediverse offers.
Corporate sites turn them on because they’re milking you for ad clicks and personal information. You make them money the more often you click things. Private sites, conversely, LOSE money if you stay there 24×7. The dynamics are different.
Oh, I agree on all points. My post wasn’t clear. I meant to say that if algorithms were available at all, they would eventually be forced on everyone due to making moderations easier by reducing the number of posts that are actually seen. Hence the only rational approach being to never develop them in the first place.
I’m not sure because that could be a feature of some instances: we have chronological timelines come to us! Would instances without eventually win? Not necessarily, right? So I don’t think that to be a necessity