feeds are a dark pattern

I'm glad to see the current wave of non-corporate social media. I'm also disappointed to see how most of them copy the worst feature of corporate ones - the feed.

I know this might sound weird, especially if you haven't tried out anything else - but bear with me.

One of the issues with feeds is how they (don't) handle the conflict between frequent vs. rare posters. Their posts are all mixed together. The only way to ensure that you've seen the posts from the latter is to try to scroll down as much as possible each time - which gets addictive. The alternative is to just take short peeks of the feed - seeing posts only from a small minority of the people you follow.

Neither is ideal. And, if you've only tried feed-based social media, you might think that the tradeoff between time spent on the platform and missed posts is unavoidable. It isn't.

Around 2 years ago, I made an experimental Mastodon client. Instead of a feed, it presented you with a page per each day, each with a list of people who posted on that day. You could expand out everyone's posts - but everything started out collapsed. You saw everyone at a glance. If any of your rarely posting friends posted something, you could prioritise them. Otherwise, you could browse the usual shitposting of your fedi-addicted friends.

This already solved that issue. However, moving past the feed let me solve other issues too - ones that I didn't even notice beforehand!

I was already organizing the posts by day, so I started showing the last passed day by default. Thanks to this, the page only changed once per day, unless you explicitly switched to the current day. This might sound insignificant, but it made the app WAY less addictive. I no longer had a compulsion to open up Mastodon over and over again. If I visited it once, I had no reason to open it again until the next day.

Now, the client was jank. It never got finished. I still had to fall back to the official client for many basic things. Yet, I still found myself heavily preferring it. I wasn't the only one, either! A friend has admitted that using my client has really helped them manage their social media usage. I felt the same.

Why didn't I finish it, then? Long story short, the feed idea is very deeply ingrained into Mastodon. I quickly ran into some fundamental limitations of the API. It was never meant to support anything but feeds. The only viable way to go forward would be to write my own fedi server, which I don't really have the time nor motivation for. (but if you do, please get in touch ^^)

recap

Feeds do a horrible job of letting you keep up with more rarely posting friends. They are one of the main reasons why social media is as addictive as it is. Going past them lets you view the issues of social media through a new lens - one that's actually useful for solving them. Furthermore, current alternative social media doesn't seem to do a very good job of letting you experiment with alternatives to feeds. Hopefully, all this will change with some future projects. Cya.

footnotes

I'm out of touch with the current state of the Fediverse, or the broader alternative social media sphere. I've stopped using it long ago. However, I still see all the big projects embrace feeds, and I still don't see any progress on issue trackers towards the things that were limiting me from finishing the client.

Here's the client:

please don't click on me without reading the rest of the article

As mentioned - it was janky as fuck. A year ago. It might not even work anymore. You'll also very probably stumble upon the issues with the API I mentioned. I'm being purposefully vague about them, as I don't blame the Mastodon team for them. My usecase is definitely not supported :p