I feel like this platform needs much better user discovery. How do I find interesting folks to follow on other instances? How do we make that trivially easy?

@ZaneSelvans What are some platforms that you think handle user discovery well? You know, for inspiration.

@bilbono Within it's limited scope -- i.e. people who know each other IRL, or close to it, FB does a good job. But for the long-reach, lateral connections that platforms like Twitter enable, I haven't seen good examples. Like, I know there are community clusters within Twitter (space twitter, urbanist twitter, bicycle twitter, spider twitter, etc...) but identifying them without being part of them already is hard. I'd love to see some keyword based clustering.

@ZaneSelvans I think that's how hashtags are supposed to function in theory. But it relies on people using them.

@bilbono @ZaneSelvans ...which is why I deploy this meme every month or so...

@mattcropp @bilbono What universe of instances does a hashtag search cover? Everything? Just the federated timeline of my home instance?

@ZaneSelvans @bilbono @mattcropp Yes, hashtag searches are limited to content your instance knows about, i.e. the same horizon as the federated timeline.

@eloquence @mattcropp @bilbono Mmm, this seems like a pretty big difference between the federated model and the centralized model, that's likely to make long distance lateral connections harder to create, and/or create powerful network effects for the largest instances, which seems counter to the idea of federating.

@ZaneSelvans @bilbono @mattcropp It actually seems a pretty good way to avoid hashtag spam and such. I see the federated timeline + federated hashtag search as a way to discover content gradually. People can build crawlers and centralized services to aid more rapid discovery.

But in many ways Masotodon is "slow social media" -- it doesn't follow the "growth growth growth" paradigm, but rather helps you grow connections at the speed that you can actually manage them.

@eloquence @mattcropp I can see that being good in the long run, but I think as someone relatively new to the platform, right now it's feeling like it's a bit empty and/or homogeneous -- though maybe this is especially true on a smaller instance like social.coop, which feels like it incentivizes joining the already large & active instances, and centralizing. Is it possible to link user accounts on multiple instances such that status updates appear as if they've come from both/either?