Whenever I participated on social media platforms in the past, key functionality seemed to be unavailable. In some cases, functionality I consider to be important just might not be that useful for most other people – but in other cases, functionality that is useful would actually be detrimental to some bottom line the company considers more important than its users, and thus doesn’t get implemented.

As just one example, I consider it to be useful for the accounts I follow, as well as those that follow me, to be checked for their activity regularly, and unfollowed automatically if they are indeed inactive – because talking into a void just isn’t fun. Follower counts are an important metric for influencer-type people and the platforms that want to attract and host them, which likely is why, as far as I am aware, none of the commercial platforms offer this functionality.

Mastodon, however, is not a commercial platform. It is an open-source, decentralized microblogging service roughly similar to the now defunct Twitter – and it has an open API allowing functionality to be added by third-party developers via their own client apps.

I consider Altamira to be an experimental companion app for Mastodon. “Companion” because my plan is not to build yet another full-fledged Mastodon client, but just something that is used in the background, in addition to whatever client app might work best for someone – and “experimental” because while I have a general idea about the kind of functionality I’d like to see, individual details often need some trial and error, and are very much up for discussion.

I will try to talk about functionality implemented in the app every now and then, so feel free to follow to come along for the ride.