(this is a bit of a rant, i’m sorry)

what in particular do you mean by lack of discoverability?

like, i want to see posts from communities that i already subscribed to, but because there’s more than 1000 communities on the fediverse and i’m only subscribed to a small countable subset of them, i inevitably lose out on a lot of content. (The “all” feed sucks unfortunately). So how to solve this?

The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many.

The Fediverse significantly lacks behind on the Content Discoverability technology.

I guess this is because there was a loud public outcry in the last 20 years that whoever makes your feed (this is called an “recommendation algorithm” or abbreviated “the algorithm”) has a lot of political power to decide what you see and what you don’t see, and that’s frowned upon. Because everybody that has power over what you see and what you don’t see is bad. That is why nobody wanted to provide an recommendation algorithm for the fediverse, because they would expose themselves to wild accusations. There should be an open-source recommendation algorithm, though; I’m sure of it.

  • squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi
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    1 day ago

    Mastodon has an algorithm in their official app. The Explore feed shows you posts that are popular among people you follow and interact with.

    Loops has a For You Page algorithm.

    There are algorithms on the fediverse. They are rare, but they do exist.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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      23 hours ago

      Is the Mastodon algorithm new? I could have sworn they used to pride themselves on the chronological-only feed.

      • squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi
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        20 hours ago

        It’s been there for a couple of years. Found a GitHub comment by Gargron talking about what it is in 2022

        The explore tab is in essence a moderated, quality-filtered federated timeline. Its purpose is to help you discover other people and expand your visibility, but without being a vector for spam and abuse.