It’s such a mess, getting worse and worse. I have a solution though:
> select * from posts where author_id in $following order by posted_date desc
No more gaming engagement or viral rage.
> select * from posts where author_id in $following order by posted_date desc
No more gaming engagement or viral rage.
Of course there’s always has been and always will be toxic content but to me it feels like society is breaking down in a way that is unlike what was happening before and it seems largely driven by social media interactions.
Surely you must willingly follow people who post this kind of content, or inflammatory tags? Because I think it's the only way this content can reach you.
Really? Right now, if I go to mastodon.social, I'm redirected to https://mastodon.social/explore and 3 out of the first 4 posts are people fulminating about "red states", "anti-racism" and "Twitter" respectively.
The strictly chronological approach seems to work fairly well as long as you only follow a few people but it doesn't scale very well.
Which ones are less political? I went to a supposedly global and tech focused instance only to find US political slogans in the "About" page itself.
> If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.
That didn't work on Twitter and I doubt it'll work on Mastodon. Neither of them have a way of categorising posts into topics. There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.
Well that's a weakness inherent to microblogging, some people like it evidently (as seen by the success of Twitter). I don't and only got a Mastodon account because I need it to follow some work I'm interested in, and indeed I need to ignore posts I don't care about.
Following and ignoring tags helps, but it's not perfect. But it works better than on Twitter.
The founding generation of Mastodon roughly overlaps with people who believe that everything in life is political. Moreover, that group roughly overlaps with people who believe that attempting to escape strident political rhetoric is itself a political action directed against whatever groups they are passionate about. Founding-generation Mastodon users have expressed concern about the Mastodon ecosystem eventually evolving out of the kind of concerns and way of writing that they have, to something more representative of the broader public.
As far as I know my experience would be the same with any other instance, nobody has to read random posts by people who just happen to be on the same instance.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were suggesting (just a chronological timeline?).