[moron4hire]

It seems to me that there is a "solution" that goes completely unspoken in these conversations.

There's the one side that says, "don't do anything opaque, just show me a chrono-timeline, I'll deal with the deluge myself". And another side that says, "you delusional to think you can deal with a deluge".

But maybe there is a third position: don't get into a deluge in the first place. Maybe the answer is actually that we shouldn't be trying to follow thousands of people on social media. Maybe there is no meaningful way to keep track of that many people and still be able to existentially understand them as, ahem, people anymore.

So far, my experience on Mastodon is bearing this out. I have almost exactly 10% of the followership on Mastodon than I do on Twitter. Yet I'm easily having 5x more conversations. The quality of those conversations is very significantly better, but I'll leave that hairy ball of unquantifiability by the wayside for now. So far, "engagement" on Mastodon is 50x better than on Twitter.