Can we have an option to just follow all Micro.blog accounts? I think I’d better happier following everyone and just elect to unfollow should the need arise.
@AndyNicolaides That's an interesting idea... I could see maybe having a way to follow anyone featured in Discover who is active. That way you're not accidentally following spammers or old accounts that aren't used anymore.
@manton yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve just yet to come across an account here that I’ve not found to be an interesting person, and even with differing views I’ve not seen anyone aggressive or forcefully pushing that view. Having an option to just reverse the normal way of things you could opt to have a full spectrum of people / viewpoints / ideas and selectively remove troublesome ones should you come across them. It stops the ‘echo chamber’ a little bit as well, of just following like minded or similar people you come across.
@manton @andynicolaides I'm not sure how it would fit into Micro.blog, but I suppose a "global" feed, similar to what App.net had may help? That way you can still keep a separate list of people you follow.
@ChrisHannah @manton If feasible, such a global feed makes a lot of sense. Another way for user discovery.
@ChrisHannah Count me in for the global timeline. Mastodon has that as well (local, not the federated one) and it’s a great way to find people on your instance. Would be a cool way to discover people here as well.
@ChrisHannah @maique @manton Ditto! Would really like access to a global feed to potentially see content on Micro.blog that I currently miss.
@thedimpause @gr36 @amit @Gaby @ChrisHannah @AndyNicolaides If y'all saw a global feed, you wouldn't want it. 🙂 From a community standpoint it would be at odds with what we're trying to do with Discover, and from a technological standpoint a global feed never scales well, which is why Twitter and App.net had to drop it. But what I'm hearing is you want more ways to find people, maybe lots of people, which is something we can work on.
@manton Agree. Count me as someone who doesn't want a global feed even if I don't use it. It brings up other issues of metrics and estimating users, etc.
@manton Though I agree with your larger point against the global feed, I would love to see it as an option. Knowing the community here may be it wouldn't be as messy 🙂
That said, I am equally curious if the current mechanism of manual curation of the Discover feed will scale well as the user base grows. Aren't we putting too much pressure on our community managers? @jean that is? 🙂
@manton Fair enough, I'll take your word that it's undesirable 🙂 Just craving something like the local Mastodon instance feeds, which can be lively but where on occasion I have found random but interesting posts and users to engage with. As you say though it's probably very dependent on the size of the instance.
@manton Yeah, I've wanted more ways to find folks here. It can be fun to pop into the profile of someone I follow and check-out the people they follow but that ends up being pretty time consuming. Some sort of feed that presents a random sample of posts to complement the current Discover feed would be very helpful.
@AndyNicolaides MB's wide range of active users has helped me reduce the effects of the filter bubble I erected so dynamically seeing more interesting MB content would be nice.
@manton That's true, "global" never does seem to scale well. But you're right, I think there's a lot of value in being able to discover relatively large numbers of people to follow. Maybe it can relate to Discover in a way, where you get a list of recently active people that post about a specific category.
@maique can you imagine a federated global feed in mastodon? Tens of thousands of posts a minute!!! 🤯
@nitinkhanna It’s crazy, I know. I was using a rather big instance, and the local one was busy enough to drive me nuts. The federated over there was just unreadable.
I meant something as the local timeline but, thanks to @manton’s reply, I now think that even that can be undesirable.
@manton Hi Manton. Been exploring this site and it is very cool. Would be interesting to be able to created something analogous to G+ circles, to organize interest groups (like librarians or skateboarders). I'm sure this has come up - no need to reply - just thinking. Best to you and the family.