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I guess the stronger pitch I would make for algorithmic feeds is that *not* having one sets up weird incentives on posting when a platform scales up to the point that people aren’t reading their whole feed.

You have to optimize *when* you post if you want people to see you and if you post more frequently you will get more views.

Of course algorithmic feeds can incentivize weird behavior too, but a good one should incentivize pro-social behavior.

Maybe this won’t become a problem on Mastodon! Maybe everyone will be happy following only enough people that they can keep up with or maybe people will never yield to the allure of posting for engagement, but I definitely have my doubts.

The big social media companies solved these problems with their algorithmic feeds—but then set up new ones when they abused the algorithm for profit or neglected the anti-social behaviors their algorithms incentivized. But maybe open-source can do better?