@jasonekratz That’s true, it’s a major problem for us right now. There is too much else to do until we hire someone new, which I really wanted to do this year.
@manton I wonder if there’s some way to crowdsource discovery in the meantime. Meanwhile I’ll just note that your reply got me to follow @jasonekratz .
@ffmike Crowdsourcing is possible and probably long overdue, but also requires some backend improvements. Replies are definitely a good way to discover people too! Especially if the “show all replies” option is selected in Account.
@manton I spent decades in software dev so I know how much easier it is to propose a feature than it is to implement it well! So I’ll just reiterate here that I’m happy with micro.blog and look forward to seeing how it grows from here.
@KimberlyHirsh @manton @jasonekratz Thanks for the insight. It’s hard to see from here just how big the job is because there’s no easy way to get a sense of how large the firehose is. Thinking a bit more about the sort of discovery I’ve enjoyed in the past, though: one of my favorite parts of the early web were the various “show me a random site” pages out there. I wonder if there’s a room (along with Discover, not as a replacement for it) for a feed that just shows one out of every X posts to all of micro.blog.
@ffmike The bigness I refer to isn’t about it being time consuming, but rather about the emotional space it requires. Jean and I would in our respective times read every single post and choose what to feature (we each had personal guidelines). One of the decisions Manton and Jean made early was that while each person is free to say whatever they want on their blog, they are limited by community guidelines in what appears on timelines. An x post feed would definitely benefit from the same limit. I do think a “Surprise me” button could be fun. @manton
@KimberlyHirsh In the early days I used to read the Twitter firehose for fun, so I have some tiny notion of the difficulties of curating (and that was before social media became the…difficult…space it is today). Setting standards for “surprise me” or “every X posts” would be equally challenging, I’m sure. Maybe @manton can come up with some AI-whizbangery to help :)