Just realised that on Mastodon, boosting *is* the algorithm.

There's no code trying to cleverly show me stuff it reckons I'd be into, based on what my contacts are into, instead my contacts are saying "I like this, I bet my contacts would like it too" and that is way smarter than any algorithm.

Thank you, boosters!

@sarajw … which funnily enough, is exactly what X-when-it-was-twitter did, back in the day.
Times change 😉

@notabene oh I know, I was there then too :)

@sarajw

Wonderfully put, and I bet @FediTips would like this 🙂

Ooookay yep thanking and celebrating boosting gets one somewhat boosted 👋😅

So because some people are struggling with too many boosts in their feeds - there are ways to make that easier.

In the vanilla Mastodon web client, there's a little filters button at the top right of the home feed. Open that and you get toggles to show or not show boosts or replies.

Another client I use a lot is called @phanpy - what's great about it is that it groups boosts into carousels that you can easily scroll down past, or swipe sideways to explore.

And if you start to use @phanpy and enjoy it, please support @cheeaun! Doing amazing work 🥰

@sarajw @phanpy

What I want is a setting that will hide other people's boosts of posts that I have already boosted or favorited: if the little rolly thing or star would be colored on a copy of the post showing in my home feed? Hide the post completely because I HAVE already seen it.

@sarajw @phanpy @elysegrasso I have written three or four different Fedi clients because this was a feature missing from most of the clients I used 😀

(Of cousre, I didn't write three or four clients for this particular feature. But I did add the feature to all of them. It's there in my current client too but due to how I implemented things, and because I'm paranoid about missing something, I don't totally hide the post but instead have it as a tiny sliver with just the booster and the boostee. If I want details, I can click on the sliver and see the full post/boost.)

@f @phanpy @elysegrasso fancy sharing said clients? :)

@sarajw Not all of them are public since I just simply write them for my own use most of the time and they are not fully tested for all environments 🙂 My server is an Akkoma server and so is non-standard in its own way ...

I think I have the source (and possibly a distro package) for the very first one here:
https://github.com/FahimF/Mastonaut

I don't believe I made the source publicly available for the rest. Most of them were macOS only or macOS + iOS only though.

@phanpy @elysegrasso

@f @phanpy @elysegrasso Great name! Mastonaut :D

@sarajw Not a name I came up with though since I simply forked somebody else's project 🙂

I think the next one I did (again a fork) was Tusker. But the source code is not on GitHub since the original project was not on GitHub. But again, can't claim credit for the name.

@phanpy @elysegrasso