"Which means, at the moment I don't have any algorithmic freedom on Mastodon." is so spectacularly wrong you compelled me to write a blog post.

https://write.as/nikclayton/on-the-mastodon-algorithm

Rage-writing is the best writing 😃

I stand corrected: there are, indeed, certain degrees of freedom in how Mastodon presents you content. I definitely didn't have those in mind when I posted.

I still contend there's even *more* freedom of choice the Fediverse can offer. And that the word "algorithm" doesn't have to be a dirty word.

Thanks @nikclayton for the blog post!

This feels a bit like the kind of Mastodon dunking culture that drives people away. The fact is, in most users' experience, the range of accessible options for the home feed is more limited than it needs to be.

Right now, Bluesky's user-created feed options have Mastodon beat, in my view. I would love to have a feed of "most-engaged-with posts from people you like that you've missed since you were last here," but that is not an option.

more limited than you want is not the same as "more limited than it needs to be".

You have agency to change this. Write clear descriptions of the changes you think would be beneficial, and why. Get feedback on that, and make adjustments as necessary. Then either

- write code that does and convince projects to adopt it
- convince someone else to write code
- pay someone else to write code

Hoping someone else will do the work for you is not a winning strategy.

Again, this is why open-source people turn everyone off. Even as someone who runs linux and *can* write code, I have no knowledge or time to write code for this particular app or to project-manage someone else to.

So then I'm back to where we started: posting on Mastodon about what I think would be valuable to work on, and hoping somebody with the power to create and accept pull requests agrees with me.

But you're wrong about hope, I don't really have that.

"I have no knowledge or time to write code for this particular app or to project-manage someone else to"

That does not negate my original point.

You do have the agency to affect the changes that you want. And you have decided that your time is better spent on other things.

That's fine -- you decide how you want to spend your time, and I'm not criticising you for that.

However, if you have decided that something is not important enough for you then (a) you should own that decision, and (b) it's a bit rich expecting other people to do volunteer work that you have decided is not personally important enough for you to do.

I am absolutely criticising you for that.

You mention social.coop, so lets look at how they do things, in particular, https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Make_a_proposal

To do that, you must:

- Take initiative
- Consult with the relevant working group
- Start a discussion, and facilitate it
- Make a formal proposal (I note that they explicitly call out "Policy-making should not be about telling others what to do.")
- There's a voting period
- Then implementation

And there's an expense process in the bylaws (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws) so that the coop can pay other people to do the implementation work if they don't have the necessary skills to do it themselves.

Their process is pretty similar to what I outlined earlier ("Write clear descriptions [...] Get feedback on that [...] write code, or convince someone else, or pay someone else").

But it starts with someone taking the initiative.

If not you, then who?