bocops

Tag: Mastodon

  • Altamira – delayed boosting

    Last week, Seth Larson published some ideas about being smart when “boosting”, which is Mastodon’s term for reblogging content and thus making it visible to your own followers. The original article can be found here, but my key takeaways are the following:

    • Considering a single account, it is preferable for boosts performed by this account to be spread out over time. If they aren’t, they will only happen when the account owner is currently active, and thus likely won’t reach other users in other timezones. The boosts will also be clustered in everyone’s timeline – and no one wants to see a dozen boosts by the same person in a row.
    • Considering a single piece of content that gets boosted, it is again preferable if not all of its boosts happen at the same time but over the course of a day or two, so that it might reach a bigger audience, and reactions such as replies get spread out a bit as well.

    Seth’s suggestion is to implement functionality in Mastodon clients to boost eventually instead of immediately – and I couldn’t help picking up that idea for the app I’m experimenting with.

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  • Altamira – a Mastodon companion app

    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.

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