Notices by Luna ??? //nullptr::live (lunafoxgirlvt@vt.social), page 7

@lina I was thinking a bit more complex where you can specify hashtags you are interested in and it will weigh posts from those hashtags in more heavily, and try to avoid recommending you the same thing over and over =w=

It will of course be optional and won't affect other instances that don't implement such features

I think we'll end up making some major changes to our instance (that people are free to use, the source is open of course).

We'll probably be implementing our own secondary timeline with post recommendations a bit like twitter (but with a focus on showing you interesting things from the instance, as opposed to make you angry.)

If possible we could work with other instances with similar goals to make it work across instances as well.

Did something catch on fire??

@alexis good thing with glitch-soc is that features there do eventually land upstream in mastodon, so it’s a slightly more compatible fork

@alexis we already run a fork called glitch-soc, so

@alexis afaik no, upstream mastodon is not really fond of that idea.

@ncommander idk that’s @lina’s domain

@ncommander set up redundancy with backup, spin up backup system and uptime monitoring, and a dev environment for testing our latest additions to main

Next week we’ll be doing some infrastructure updates, I’ll announce when exactly. There should be a couple of hours of downtime while that happens.

The infrastructure updates should allow for future updates to have virtually 0 downtime

@caturteer mastodon is the name of the server we’re running (technically we’re running Mastodon Glitch Edition, which is a fork with some modifications to the UI)

Mastodon works via something called ActivityPub, which means this server can talk with other servers that know how to speak ActivityPub as well. This allows you to follow, tag, like and in general see people from other servers

@tlapka because hashtags are not discoverability, with enough users they are just a useless flood.

@tlapka but of course, silencing does not transfer to other instances so it’s still a problem.

Which is why it would be better as a feature that adds an algorithmic timeline. But again, a lot of people really don’t want that.

@tlapka idea would be that we’d silence the bot so people will only receive those recommendations if they follow it, all it’ll do is boost posts at a maybe 15 minute interval or something.

Ideally I’d add a (nice) algorithmic timeline as a feature and submit it back upstream, but people have already tried and I know what fedi drama that has lead to in the past…

For people who’s livelyhood depends on discoverability the fact that Twitter is a collapsing is kind of a threat on their life. Including for people like me who are not able to work a normal job without getting burnt out and as a result, suicidal.

I want to try to see if we can carve out a space for people here so that such things don’t happen…

In general a lot, or at least a very loud minority of fedi wants to explicitly keep algorithms that could improve discoverability away.

Mmm since Mastodon’s discoverability is one massive issue for artists, etc. that might end up residing on our instance, I could potentially look in to making a bot that tries to promote interesting users of our instance that people optionally can follow.
I’m not sure how it would go down with the rest of fedi though, since a lot tend to be anti people-making-a-living-via-discoverability-giving-them-customers from what I can tell.

A lot of people moving over are using cross posters, I’ll personally manually cross post anything if need be, makes for a way better user experience

By the way, Luna and I are hosting vt.social on our own (professional) infra and we have room and ideas for growth! It's small right now, but we're already planning out how to add more frontends and capacity when needed.

So while we can't promise 100% uptime in the early days and there could be mad scrambles to scale up, we have the resources to do it quickly!