would it be so terrible if a server had a 'most followed accounts' section for new users, and it showed like the top 100 accounts being followed by other users on the server?
@jdp23 hmm, would it be worse than people trying to find accounts on their own? like what if other people on a server are following a more diverse set of accounts already?
@smitten it would be better for white people and guys than trying to find accounts on their own, it would be worse for women and people of color and especially women of color. So white guys are more likely to say "cool, this is a place for me" and others are more likely to leave. "Rich get richer" algorithms like this tend to magnifiy existing inequities.
To get a diverse list, most if not all servers would need to manually curate recommendations.
@jdp23 I don't think there's many men on snowdin so that part may be better here. I think it's mostly white though, very few people from the US too. yeah curated lists is probably a better idea, maybe we can get started on that then. I just think people need a foothold when they first join.
@smitten Totally agree that people need a better foothold when they first join, it's an area where the feidverse really needs to make progress.
And you may well be right about how the gender aspects would work out on snowdin, I was over-generalizing. It's hard to know though; even if snowdin is mostly women, dynamics of the overall fediverse could still skew most-followed to men.
@smitten@jdp23 For some reason, maybe my experiences with pre-algorithm Twitter, but I haven’t had any trouble finding folks to follow. So how can we pass this along, make it easy? Here was my strategy.
Find my people from Twitter using tools that probably don’t work anymore (due to API).
Followed a couple of hashtags, and followed people I saw from there.
When my regular feed is empty, I switch to local, and I’ve followed a few folks from there.
When that’s empty, I scroll the federated timeline and find people that way.
Follow people I see from other people’s boosts and replies.
I do see people who don’t manage to plug into community here, and I’m not sure why. I wish I could help them.
@corbden still, despite the challenges, I think encouraging people to take that approach -- and making it easier -- is likely to work out better in terms of diversity and equity than other approaches. Even a curated list has its limits; there's no way a single list can handle all the diverse interests and demographics of people coming here.
@jdp23@smitten Right and then there’s the issue of how people can find that if they don’t follow anybody. I wish moving accounts was easier because then it would make sense to create an onboarding instance, where you join there and it’s got lots of cluttering features designed to help newbies get established, with the intent that they move in a few months.
@corbden good suggestions, and yes there are lots of ways to make progress on it. It just hasn't been a priority. We'll se how things change in response to the Metapocalypse @smitten
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