(2023-03-27) Erlend Feed Overload

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Feed Overload. The all too common firehose stream has never worked for me. It’s undoubtedly a big reason why I never got properly into Twitter.

Mastodon – the mainstream ActivityPub implementation – is the same way; algorithmic or chronological sorting makes no difference as long as everyone's speech is mashed together into one mega-aggregate stream of no structure.

I can handle an email inbox, a bulletin-board or an RSS reader, because these feeds usually serve up somewhere between 1-10 updates per day, instead of 100s.

if Twitter had accommodated better sorting controls, both from the writer's content-push (e.g. require hashtag categorization) and the reader's content-pull (follow a poster's hashtags), I'd follow a lot more people

In the blogging paradigm, I could (and did) feasibly follow 500 different blogs

just a skim-read would suffice to keep up. On average I'd read around 2-5 full articles per day.

Microblogging on the other hand is like a noisy dinner party that never stops.

Knowledge cultivation vs dissemination

The fediverse of microbloggers' primary objective isn't knowledge cultivation, but rather social bonding and sentiment aggregation.

For the likes of me (generally shy & quiet; loud & proud if asked to speak) to functionally participate in the digital conversation of the federated party, three key features are missing in today's microblogging & feed-aggregation clients:

• Follow hashtags
• Bundling content
• Content gardening

Follow hashtags, not people... topics, not specific people.

This would be further facilitated by solving the problem of federated search

I can easily follow 500 people if I'm only following updates pertaining to my specific interests.

Side note: While it might be a controversial opinion, I'm not a fan of inline hashtags as a default way of tagging content

Bundles over timelines

I've not seen a lot of examples of this kind of interface in practice. Aside from the mailing list example above, a few others that come to mind are Google Inbox and LindyLearn.

Evergreen content gardens

Treating hashtags as not just timelines of the present moment but also containers of institutional knowledge could lead to all sorts of innovations in knowledge management on the fediverse.

My intention for this post is to gently nudge developers' attention towards a new paradigm that aims to bridge the gap between gossip and sense-making.