> For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time, it plans to gather more signals from ar

> For example, Mozilla is currently experimenting with a Discover feed that aims to surface engaging content. Over time, it plans to gather more signals from around the fediverse to determine what sort of content people are interacting with. Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more. (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused successfully with tragic results for all of us.) Let me back up this statement with simple math: If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the numbers get. Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering, formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage. Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and then slowly stop using it.