Notices by John Conway (john@sauropods.win), page 2

@mike Support an audience that leads to Patreon conversions, book sales, commissions, etc. It's mercenary, but there you are, it's how we make a living.

@mike I don't agree that treating it something like a broadcast medium is a mistake. Twitter and Mastodon are *explicitly* asymmetric to allow this, unlike Facebook where the relationships are symmetric.

@mike Yes, Facebook added a specific mechanism for it (because Facebook was trying to be an everything app).

I'm not sure where in this conversation everyone got the idea that I was arguing that algorithmic timelines are a great idea – I explicitly say the opposite in the first post – my point is that Mastodon competes with big social networks, and algorithmic timelines are a competitive advantage for many, many people.

We need to give them something competitive.

@mike Algorithmic timelines are actually two things mashed together:

1. A filter, prioritising the most popular posts from the people you follow, which is meant to keep the entertainment value high

2. A recommendation engine, which is meant to aid in discovery

We can probably do without the first. The second gets to the huge discoverability problem on Mastodon. People don't know who to follow or how to find stuff that's interesting to them, and they often give up.

@mike I'd like to see search and a recommendation engine API of some sort. The engine would have to be _very_ carefully built though.

@mike You have strong interests and intent. A lot of people just don't, they use social media for light entertainment, and that's fine by me.

@mike I'm thinking more of a "StumbleUpon for the fediverse", rather than a "silently alter your feed based on feedback you didn't even realise you were giving".

A painting I call Sinopteroberries, for #PterosaurPtuesday. Two juvenile Sinopterus eating some podocarp berries.

https://johnconway.art/sinopteroberries

#art #pterosaurs

I've been thinking about the lack of algorithmic* feeds in the #Fediverse and wondering how much that is hurting growth and retention. Big social media spend billions on getting and keeping eyeballs, and algorithmic timelines are a huge part of that.

I think it's right to avoid it, but I worry that will just forever stunt growth. The alternative is human curators, I think, but I have no idea how to make that happen.

*Yes, I know reverse chronological is an algorithm, algo-pedants.

#mastodon

Mastohost @mastohost is taking on new accounts again. You can get your own Mastodon server for $6 a month! The great thing about it is they take care of the software, you do not need to be technical to run a server.

Mastohost is where sauropods.win is hosted, and I can recommend them. Support is top-notch, and it's all been smooth sailing.

https://masto.host/

#hosting #mastodon #fediverse

@joel @mastohost in the recent upgrade to V.4 I think it was offline for a very sort period. Like seconds or minutes.

@Cporosus hi Charles, how are you accessing Mastodon, thought the web interface, or an app?

@Cporosus No one else has reported any problems, so I'm not sure what it could be. Are they just ordinary JPEGs without weird characters in the filenames?

Have you tried uploading through an app? (I'm just curious to see if that works).

Tagging my hosting provider to see if they have any ideas @mastohost

#SauropodSaturday's here, and so is Giraffatitan. Having a roll in the Jurassic mud.

#dinosaurs #art #sauropods

For no apparent reason, I made this alternative #Mastodon logo. I think it was created out of my burning conviction that logos should all be visual puns, and the more puns the better.

So here it is, the head is a speech bubble AND the body is an "M". Puneriffic!

#design #logo #fediverse

Actually what I want is a #Fediverse logo that works in B&W and small sizes.

The current one look nice enough big, but fails on both those counts.

#logo #design

@mastohost Narrator: there was a flood of new users. ?

@Anke What bad reputation do you think it has?

@Anke That's not entirely wrong I suppose, but there's so much more than that obviously.

Tumblr's weird. It's got a pretty good platform for outward-facing blogging, but a culture (caused by reblogs easy, comments hard) that makes such blogs pretty much incomprehensible.

@fluffy @admin I think ActivityPub was developed partly in response to what Mastodon was already doing, so I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, standards are good, on the other hand, sometimes implementation practicalities and moving a little faster are really important.

I kinda agree that ActivityPub is a pretty heavyweight solution that probably could have been solved by composing smaller already existing standards, but the ship has sailed.