My experience is likely the same as that of many other.

When you are first new to mastodon, and you begin setting up your account, you make some basic selections. There is nothing unusual about that but, what do you do next? That’s the real aim of this article. What are your best next steps, and where is mastodon really headed as it changes to accomodate the rise in adoption?

Those are important questions to address but, first I will explain a little bit of an experiment that we have done here at DCKIM. The initial account setup, being complete, we have now chosen to use the ‘mute’ feature to make a harsh cropping of the visible accounts.

Why use the ‘mute’ feature that way?

We’re not sure, it’s just an experiment. We have nothing else muted, and we are starting from absolute zero on the account. Basically a blank slate.

Knowing that, consider that we have now muted accounts solely on the basis of ‘followers number’ or ‘following number’.

For ‘followers’ we have placed a hard ceiling at 10K followers. Similar, for ‘following’ we have placed the ceiling at 1K following.

How is ‘mute’ normally used?

This is an assumption but, a pretty safe one: ‘Muting’ is ordinarily used when you don’t like/prefer the content of what you are seeing on the feed. This is a quick way to eliminate the input of something or someone that you don’t want to see. It is seen as less harsh than ‘blocking’.

I feel like using ‘mute’ and ‘block’ in a similar manner is very much the way we would expect average users to behave.

“I don’t like it so I am muting it.” “I don’t like it so I am blocking it.”

Operating in this binary way makes both of these actions very similar, as negative control actions. That sort of reduces the usefulness of these, because they are almost the same thing. So, we end up with two lists that are produced which we can look at later and essentially undo our ‘blocking’ or ‘muting’ actions. Depending on how many are in each list, it might be very labour intensive to review and revise those lists. That’s okay, it seems fairly normal.

Instead we have used ‘mute’ to visually eliminate certain accounts but, it’s not because we don’t like them, or don’t value them.

The decision is taken purely on the metrics that are available. 10K Followers = Mute, 1K Following = Mute.

So, the results are fairly interesting, and not completely unpredictable.

It has taken some time to accomplish this but, not too much.

There actually are not too many accounts which satisfy either condition. In total, the biggest accounts, 10K+ number under 2000. That’s just a guess but, we can easily find an mute them, because they dominate the Trending Tab completely, especially if you look at the profiles section. Then it’s actually a really easy system to implement. The only problem is that I like a lot of those accounts which I have now muted.

The results of this?

We are now seeing exclusively the ‘small-fry’ accounts and we are facilitating interaction with those smaller accounts. It seems pretty good so far, and not entirely unexpected. I actually like it quite a bit better like this. I don’t really believe that anyone can, within reason, follow more that 1K accounts. It’s just not realistic to me, and the accounts that have more than 10K followers completely dominate the entire feed.

All around, this is an interesting experiment, though maybe not completely practical. The only way for this to be better, is if we could have some direct user input into the Mastodon Algorithm. That way we could quickly change those two ‘cut-off’ numbers, or maybe even other things related to the Algorithm.

Nothing wrong with algorithms per se but, I would like to tinker with it at my leisure.

So, back to the subject of commercialization on Mastodon: It’s not such a bad thing. It isn’t banned, it’s actually just a normal usage. Any account holder can basically openly advertise. This is probably the strongest point for Mastodon… period. People can solicit their own work, or even try to sell you something, or promote their own projects and artwork. Self-promotion is the norm. That’s actually a good thing.

There are users who regularly produce and make available high quality content or commentaries. Subsequently their follower counts are increased. This is also normal but, it leads to a narrowing of the input for any algorithm, which just does a simple count of the numbers: replies | boosts | quotes | favourites.

The big fish maintain the advantage, even where quality degrades. It’s simply a numbers game.

As Companies Begin to Enter the Realm,

What tools could the user be offered in order to combat the prevalence and infiltration of advertisement regiments? That’s where we are looking, and this little experiment might be a source of something positive, showing a small light for the way forward for Mastodon.