this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
129 points (97.8% liked)
Asklemmy
50786 readers
971 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess fair enough, though every other federated site I know of uses some other algorithm, and you seem to have been talking about the fediverse in general, not Mastodon, except for the example. Still, Mastodon's sort is still an algorithm. You can't display anything without an algorithm. That word just means a set of rules to complete a task. Mastodon uses one that only uses who you're following and time to decide what to display.
Algorithms aren't the issue. We can have sophisticated algorithms that help users find the content they want. That's great. It's when there is an incentive, and ability, to influence the algorithm by the platform controllers when there's an issue. The fediverse solves this not by ditching algorithms, but by having no singular controller.