Is this sort of thing inevitable? The fact we feel compelled to bring algorithmic content sorting into the fediverse says something about the way we use social media. The author mentions that reverse-chronological timelines make you feel like you need to spend hours scrolling through much of the same thing to make sure you’re not falling behind on the internet. The other side of that is, why is it that we’re all spending so much time dumping the same thing into each other’s timelines? (I’m at least a little aware that I’m probably the nth person you’ve seen posting about this or a similar problem in the last week)
My solution to the timeline getting too fast has always been to unfollow/mute people, but maybe that’s getting impractical.
Yeah, it’s entirely a philosophical problem, and one that I’m mostly at peace with, so long as the fediverse remains somewhat decentralized. The cynic in me wonders if it’s only a matter of time before the larger instances make a substantial break in federation and mostly go off on their own, but I suppose that wouldn’t affect the rest of the fediverse. It’d just affect our larger goal of getting more people into a decentralized network.
I have never used Tumblr, and I have no idea whether it’s chronological or whether it has an algorithm, but if it does use an algorithm, I can’t imagine that changing when they join the fediverse. But even if most of them get an algorithmic feed combining tumblr and greater fediverse content, as long as I can access their content on my own terms, it’s all good to me. Even if tumblr pulls lots of users away from smaller instances, it still works out ok because I can still control how I consume their content.
It only becomes a problem if tumblr pulls people away from the greater fediverse, and then disconnects from it, but that’s a different issue altogether, and one that worries me more than algorithms
While having multiple, mutually exclusive fediverses would be a disappointing step down from the idea of a single cohesive fediverse, even that would be better than everybody being on a corporate silo. I could also envision a future where some organizations have their own fediverse with varying levels of interaction with a wider, public fediverse.