Reading the latest Michael “mookie” Terraciano blog post on the migration to BS is almost painful

There are algorithms here too -- Mastodon's Explore page and Trending Topics, now recommendations for new people to follow. But they haven't increased the percentage of people who stick around after showing up.

And last time I asked around, people how have been on Bluesky for a while spent most of their time on the Following feed (which is similar to Mastodon's home feed: chronological posts and boosts from people you follow, with some replies from people you follow as well).

So, there are algorithms in both places. One big difference is that Bluesky gives you the ability to choose between multiple feeds, which is very useful (and one of the areas they go beyond Twitter). It would also be useful to see something like that here but I don't think its absence is a big reason why the overwhelming majority of people who show up here decide not to stay.

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@jdp23 @fromjason @eniko @oblomov It’s the crickets, that’s why.

That was the primary feedback I got from moving 143 friends off Twitter and onto my own community Masto instance here. Most have gone back to Twitter and/or play around in Bluesky and Threads. They want an algo—federated feed doesn’t cut it for them, even though I spent a lot of time curating hashtag relays they’d enjoy—and more engagement from randos.

That must be really frustrating. I've also invited a lot of people here and helped them get started, relatively few of them have stayed, but you put a lot more effort into it than I did ... and, your experience really speaks to the challenges fedi has.

Here's how I'd phrase it in terms of the problem statement: People in general want interesting content, and most can't find it here. People who want more engagement from randos don't get it here -- and conversely a lot of my friends left because of unpleasant engagement with randos. Even when the instance admin does a lot of work, the federated feed doesn't address either of thees problems.

People are used to finding these things on Twitter and Facebook, both of which rely heavily on algorithms. Mastodon uses "no algorithms" as a selling point (even though it's not true) ... and it seems like algorithms would help with these very real problems.

But Mastodon does have algorithms. What gets shown on the federated feed is a really complex algorithm! It's just that the algorithms don't give people what they want.

Different algorithms could help with these problems ... if the content that people want is here, and if the culture leads to that non-obnoxious randos engaging in non-obnoxious ways. Of course there aren't any one-size-fits all algorithms, which is where Bluesky's choice fits in. Still, using Twitter-like algorithms in a situation where the demographics and culture are very different isn't necessarily going to lead to results right off the bat that are anywhere near as good here as they were for many people on Twitter (who had spent a long time training the algorithm with their likes and boosts).

And algorithms aren't the only way to address these problems ... affordances, federation structure, norms, demographics etc etc etc all factor into it too. So while I think Bluesky-like algorithmic choice is very useful, I'm still not convinced that it by itself would have a major impact on more people having a good enough experience that they want to stay and invite their friends.

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