I use Mastodon but with out retweets ("boosts") in my timeline, because some of it I find only marginally interesting. I can still find new accounts to follow by reading discussions under tootd.

I feel similarly about “boosting”, a lot of people who I follow that sometimes have worthwhile things to say in my opinion boost stuff that is utter trash leaving the question of do I unfollow the booster, mute the OP, block the OP, etc.

There are a few ways a toot can get boosted massively, politically oriented outrage is by far the most common.

That's arguably what "the algorithm" is about.

I think there's a marked difference between seeing boosts of the people you directly follow versus an opaque algorithm that shows you content from the broader network. The former puts you in control: you choose who to follow based on if you like their content and their boosts. The latter is usually tuned towards showing you content that will keep you on the site (and looking at ads), but isn't necessarily content you want to see. As commercial social networking sites become increasingly profit driven, they'll crank the algorithm towards engagement at the cost of everything else. In contrast, a chronological feed of content created by or boosted by the people you directly follow is not "the algorithm".

On Mastodon, I discovered someone via a boost who had wrote a great blog post. I followed them but found my feed was now full of bird photography (their main hobby, and something I don't care for). I added a filter for "#BirdsOfMastodon" (or something), but there were still too many without that tag. So I unfollowed them and now I don't see any bird photos.

Also I recently learned that different people see different comments on the same Instagram post and they to me is something I’d never thought of about echo chambers. Like you could send someone an Instagram post and assuming Instagram has their history they might see different comments than you

That's just about adding more people to your echo chamber though isn't it?

"Needs to escape their echo chamber and read other stuff" is a bit too strong, but if you moderated it to "would benefit from escaping their echo chamber and being exposed to other stuff" then yes, I would take that position for literature preferences as well as political news.

I sometimes read literature outside my comfort zone. Sometimes I put it down -- not for me. But occasionally I discover a new genera I enjoy.

The trouble with political content is the style rather than the content, I think.

If you see ads for Ground News on YouTube they make it sound like you need add up what the right-wing ideologues say and what the left-wing ideologues say you get the truth. I get accused of being a “centrist” when I point out that people are using a toxic, hateful and othering style of communication (e.g. capitalizing Black doesn’t do anything about the difficult and long-standing problems of racism, maybe even mocks or trivializes the problem, but it sure polarizes the world into big B and little B people)

>That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though.

That would be the benefit.

What does that mean? If you don’t want to follow accounts, I would have thought that sort of social media isn’t for you (which is a pretty valid stance!)

That sounds like a good change?

I mean, if you don't actually know someone yet, is it really a good idea to hang on their every word the way social media does?

If you follow people of certain hobbies - for example, retro computing - then it's a great way to discover others sharing the same interest. You can check their timeline to see if that's someone you want to follow or just choose not to. And if you really dislike someone, you can just block them. I think that retweets/boosts become a really good discovery mechanism here.

If your hobby is e.g., NFL Football, then yeah, the signal/noise ratio makes retweets a terrible thing that just clutters your feed.