All the AI generated illustrations used in this post appear to show a wooly mammoth and not a mastodon. Here is a nice comparison; the mastodon is on the right: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVsMastodon.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVs...</a>
I like the concept of "social media delivers a dumb feed, then my device groups and organizes them." In line with what is written in the conclusion, I would love to use a client like this that also does curation (by floating topics to the top once it starts seeing which topics you click on most) and then allowing interrogation/tuning of these recommendations. Why use openai instead of a local model though? (I'd imagine mistral-8x7-instruct would do well with the summarization task)
I'd like to see a client with a set of features to enable manual feed curation. I think it's possible with maybe just two missing features:<p>1. Mark as read: the ability to mark posts, threads, or followed users as read. Your feed only shows unread stuff. Threads would become unread if they get new posts in them.<p>2. Prioritization of Following: You can sort your Following list in any order and unread messages and threads are presented in that order.<p>I use essentially this method with my work Slack, which has a "sorted like your sidebar" option for the Unreads. I have a bunch of folders for different priority channels and individuals, with my immediate team, reports, and boss and the topics I work on at the top, various company wide stuff at the bottom, and a some of grades in between containing channels for my department and partners. As soon as I set it up this way it improved my Slack productivity and I started wishing I could sort Mastodon and Twitter this way.
Very interesting, IMHO one of Mastodon's biggest advantage is not the reverse-order timeline, but the ability to build your own timeline view, pick your own algorithms. There are already a few frontend-based solutions. This one is another, and quite interesting.<p>I only wish the (vastly underfunded) Mastodon team would see this as an opportunity to provide server-computed timelines to prevent clients from fetching too much information just to get their own summary.
> On a more philosophical note, I like the idea of social media algorithms but I hate the implementations.<p>> What do you think? How could it be improved?<p>Here is some interesting technology:<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B">https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B</a> - ML on the blockchain<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft">https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft</a> - Federated Learning<p>Incentives are much harder but smart contracts can handle the tech part.<p>Going this route you quickly have "quantum AI app store" and your system of government is a 12GB download. Can't even say if it's a good idea compared to e.g. anarcho-primitivism.
Good for you for reaching HN frontpage, Tim! This from a guy also on fosstodon =) Love the low-tech prototype.<p>There exists a future where this kind of social media content curation is a viable and bootstrappable startup option. I'd like to live in that future.
The mastodon client I really want is my web browser. I want my web browser to be able to go to a mastodon web server and see HTML of posts (and responses! so no, /embed is not a solution) with actual text. This traditional form of interface was removed in most mastodon implementations from version 3 and on for some reason. Requiring execution of complex code, either in the browser as javascript, or on your computer as a native client, is not cool. At least for twitter there's nitter but there's no easy way to read mastodon posts/threads.
Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and share them, you have control over sorting, etc.<p>I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential. You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show.<p>I think this type of user control is exactly what social media needs. The power placed in the hands of users.
For federated systems like this why are there clients and servers... shouldn't they all be using a single system that stores all that user content locally and uses federation to communicate to others? I don't get why you'd want an account on someone else's server when you can be running your own.
I use k-means clustering to find topics using mpnet. I've done similar things with other kinds of document vectors and never had so much success.<p>It is good for classification too and used in my YOShInOn smart RSS reader which I sometimes think of pointing at Mastodon.
Slightly off topic: I like that the SQLite database file is called “fossil”, because fossil is both relevant to mastodons and is the name of the source code management system for SQLite. That’s a fun intersection there.