[fleddr]

If one was to be a purist, you'd remove the boost option.

With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted.

As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. Not necessarily because it's so awesome, simply because it's the post that is shown more prominently.

This simple snowball effect has viral potential, hence it's just as corruptible as Twitter. It can and will be used agenda-driven. Power always consolidates, hence soon you'll have the elitist layer with large followers boosting each other's posts. The other 95% gets zero traction or engagement.

The other downside of boosts, retweets, quote tweets is that it discourages writing your own original posts. More than 80% of what Twitter calls tweet activity is simply retweets, not new tweets.

Finally, if you want organic social media, people to follow should never ever be automatically recommended. This triggers the exact same snowball effect.

[mhink]

> The other downside of boosts, retweets, quote tweets is that it discourages writing your own original posts. More than 80% of what Twitter calls tweet activity is simply retweets, not new tweets.

I don't really see a way around this unless you explicitly try to prevent people from posting things that have been posted before. IIRC, retweets were originally just normal tweets that people tacked the letters "RT" in front of. It was an emergent social pattern that got reified into a feature.

[fleddr]

I'm under no illusion that such feature will ever be removed, but I stand by the concept/idea that social media should be about people sharing their own thoughts and ideas, rather than this lazy and mindlessly redistribution.

[miloignis]

I think it's the opposite - without an "Algorithm" (instead just the simple algorithm of sorting posts by time) there's no natural way to find other interesting people to follow!

What Mastodon does is replace a computerized algorithm that tries to find you things you would be interested in with a "social algorithm" which is people you follow boosting posts that they like or find interesting.

It's like getting book recommendations from a friend instead of Amazon! Sharing things that we like with others is a deeply human activity, one I think is generally very positive.

Anyway, if you don't like what someone's boosting, you can prevent their boosts from showing up on your feed. Great thing about a FOSS, interoperable system is it's configurability!

[fleddr]

"I think it's the opposite - without an "Algorithm" (instead just the simple algorithm of sorting posts by time) there's no natural way to find other interesting people to follow!"

Sure there is, it's called "effort". And that's the problem. You can scan directories of users, search based on topic, tags, explore chronological timelines of instances. Manually craft your feed like this, organically.

But I agree that this will not work anymore these days as people are used to algorithms taking care of this.

[rpdillon]

I haven't read the source, but I was under the impression that boosting is just retweeting. It increases visibility because it is now sourced from another timeline, not because there's a hidden value that's being incremented.

[shadowgovt]

Boost is a shortcut for "re-toot by copying and pasting all the contents and a link to the original" with some convenience sugar on the timelines.

If boost were removed, users would re-invent it.