Strange correlation, so I'm wondering if anybody else has seen this, or if I'm just getting boring?

It seemed like I had more interaction when the number of people I followed, and that follow me, were lower.

Makes me think about whether there's a sweet spot. I'm finding it harder to keep track of people I usually interact with too.

@BobWilliams i keep mini lists of groups that i check in with to hopefully make sure i don't lose track.

@BobWilliams for eom the bird place I found a sweet spot around 500. I *think* the sweet spot might be lower here given the overall engagement is more genuine.

@BobWilliams seems to be the case; maybe use more hashtags?

@BobWilliams I've begun to encounter the same. I think everyone has me on mute lol

@BobWilliams I noticed that on Twitter and here. It (unfortunately) makes sense that as each of us grow our networks, our engagement with "our first ones" falls off. We all expand past our capacity to keep up. Algorithm or no algorithm.

@BobWilliams Bob. Do you use 'Lists'?

@BostonBibliophile I do too, and I think if I hadn't I really would have lost track. We are replacing what algorithms used to do with out own efforts I suppose.

@jaykass I think you're right. Not sure what to do it about though. I always follow back anyone that follows me.

@JonChevreau That's true, I rarely do. Are you finding the same thing for yourself?

@BobWilliams
My timeline is flowing pretty fast, making it difficult to keep up. I have a lot of active people.

@LibertyForward1 Lol. I wondered that same, maybe I was posting too much?

@Catelli That makes good sense. Here we really have to make it work for ourselves in unique ways.

@BobWilliams it's the trade off for not being on the birdsite.

@LikeItOrLumpIt I do, and it's a help for sure. Still feels like some things are falling between the cracks though.

@jaykass Also, are you impressed that I didn't say "You sure about that's why?".

@BobWilliams @JonChevreau

The more people I follow, more posts get skipped when I have to by-pass the 200 posts that arrived while I was having lunch.

That's something I've noticed but haven't felt the urge to cull the lists back down since the serendipity factor matters a lot to me.

I *do* follow a lot of hashtags, too, so I'm always finding more new people to follow.

@BobWilliams not really noticed that hash tags make a huge difference

@chameleon_muse That's a good way to say it, because it feels quick now. It was a nice lazy amble at the beginning.

@BobWilliams Hopefully, the people who interact with you on a regular basis are the understanding type, if you miss something. 🙂 Either way, the masto interaction is way better than I had on the bad bird site.

@BobWilliams Perhaps.. but I think I've got you beat hands-down on quantity. I was flat-out blocked by someone today because I boosted too many times and am just "looking for followers". 🤷

@BostonBibliophile When I think about it that way, totally worth it.

@BobWilliams I've been waiting a long time for a hit on Mastodon!

@nlowell @JonChevreau Appreciate these insights, Nathan. Possible I'm missing the initial bliss of finding a a healthy landing space.

@JonChevreau Thanks, Jon. I will try that out.

@nlowell @BobWilliams think it’s the law of diminishing returns

Welcome to Fedi level 2. Congratulations, you can now curate your timeline.

Consider:
a) a second account to split off specific interests that take up a lot of your timeline
b) muting some people for a while, it's not rude, it's effective
c) consider using RSS for read-only follows (e.g. news or bots) and get an RSS-reader
d) there must be people that post things you don't like, consider mute filtering by tags or keywords

@LikeItOrLumpIt I think they are, it's a kind bunch here. Totally agree, it's a lot more fun and pleasant.

@BobWilliams realizing I just mixed up corncob tv and the hot dog vacuum skits.

@BobWilliams On the other hand, when I posted about the incident I received a surprising amount of support so maybe we're not on mute, maybe people are just busy 😜

@BobWilliams @JonChevreau

Are you saying the honeymoon is over? 🤪

@jaykass I mix the skits together all the time, it's great fun. :)

@LibertyForward1 I do think the whole things is just bigger and busier now, part of the deal I guess.

@nlowell @JonChevreau As long as it develops into a healthy relationship, it'll be okay. : )

@BobWilliams

@nlowell @BobWilliams maybe we’re beyond the first date & thinking of going steady

@BobWilliams Definitely, not just you 🙂 I feel the same way and make a conscious effort to reduce the number of people I follow when my timeline starts becoming too busy …

I hit a point where I’ll feel as if I’m just drowning trying to keep up and that I’m mostly reading but not interacting. Then I try to cut down on the timeline (or move some people over to lists so that they don’t hit the main timeline) so that I have less stuff to deal with. Seems to improve things … at least for me …

@f I appreciate these thoughts, seems it will take continued experimentation, so knowing what you are trying is very helpful.

@BobWilliams Happy to help in any way I can 🙂 I’ve been running some experiments myself in reducing my home timeline by filtering but only by way of customising my client app since the generally available apps don’t seem to have that feature.

I find lists much more useful now that I can filter out list members from my home timeline but somebody else said something which leads me to believe that other people might be disregarding the home timeline altogether (since they can’t filter by lists membership) and simply putting all of the people they are following into lists so that they only deal with lists.

Not sure if that’ll help you but just mentioning in case it does …

@f very interesting. I have pondered trying to tinker with an instance and make modifications, but it’s originally out of my depth.

@f Are you doing these changes through browser plugins, or modifying instance code?

@BobWilliams Making changes at the instance end would be one way to set things up for a larger group of people I guess 🙂

For me, personally, there aren’t a lot of Fediverse implementations which have the features I want and the ones that do are implemented in programming languages that I’d have to learn, or the implementation itself is rather cumbersome, as is the case with Mastodon.

So I opted to do the changes at the client-end with specific client apps since that’s a little bit more manageable. That presents certain problems but less so than managing the server-side stuff to do things in an efficient way … at least for me.

Plus, if you get the client working right, you can use it to connect to any instance and so be able to move to a new server if you wanted, etc. 🙂

@f Cool! I’ve been browser only to keep myself curbed on the phone, so I haven’t explored any clients yet.

@BobWilliams I guess it might be possible to do something from the browser end but for that I’ve only explored things like writing a browser-based client in JavaScript 🙂

That’s probably the solution which would cater to most people since it should run on most (any?) platforms but it turned out that there wasn’t an existing pure JavaScript solution that I could leverage. I’d have to write all of it on my own. I got started but didn’t go beyond displaying a timeline since all the work that remained seemed too daunting and it was too long to wait for the payoff.

So I just found the best native (macOS) client that was open source, and modified it to add the features I wanted. But I’ll probably go back to the JavaScript client at some point since it should help a lot more people (possibly) …

@f I wish I had your skills, but I will hackily attempt to tinker at some point. I followed you so I can keep up if you post any experiments. Fun stuff to ponder.

@BobWilliams If you are on macOS, I’d be happy to post binaries in one of my GitHub repos so that you can try out the functionality now …

Otherwise, you’d have to wait till I get around to doing the JavaScript client 🙂 I don’t think I posted the source for it online since it’s way too early in development but if you’d like to play around with that, I can post the source for that on GitHub too …

@f very kind of you, MacOS is over my head, but when JavaScript is in play, keep me in mind. Thanks.🙂

@BobWilliams Sure 🙂 Will put up the JavaScript code on GitHub at some point today and let you know … It’s very basic at the moment but it will at least let you connect to an instance and see your home timeline. From there to filtering should be fairly straightforward since all you need to do is go through the fetched posts and figure out what you want to filter out … (hopefully) 😛

@f Nice, thanks very much! Not urgent at all, just whenever you get the time, it'll be fun to look at. : )

@BobWilliams If I don’t do something immediately, I (generally) forget to do it later … So I did a quick GitHub repo, added a README and updated the code. Here it is:

https://github.com/FahimF/FediJS

It used to run fine a few months back but apparently has issues now 😛 I did a few quick fixes to get it to show the login screen but can’t get beyond that at the moment since I originally did the development for a Mastodon instance and I’m now on Akkoma and Akkoma recently changed their auth mechanism.

I don’t know for a fact that that’s the issue but hopefully, if you are on Mastodon, it just works for you. Will take a look perhaps this weekend to see what the issue is but would be happy to discuss further if you run into issues too …

@f This is great, please don't spend too much time on it. I will poke around when I can and let you know how I do. It may be over my head, we'll see. Thanks!

@BobWilliams Sure thing 🙂

I just like finding solutions and I do like knowing that a JS solution is there if I want it. So any poking around is not (just) for your sake 😛

There were a couple of more advanced JS clients that I took a look at but I think they either got too complicated coding wise or didn’t have the features I wanted. I like to keep things as simple as possible …

But in case it helps, here are the links to those too:

https://github.com/oken1/kurotodon

https://github.com/nolanlawson/pinafore

https://github.com/NickColley/semaphore