Notifications are a pain point:
giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.
They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.
They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.
And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.
There are definitely technical improvements that can be made to make Mastodon a more enjoyable experience for major or minor celebrities and their following. I hope people using Mastodon come around on their views on algorithmic filtering. They are on the “naive algorithm or bust” train. Giving users more control over their feeds and notifications algorithmically seems like such an obvious win to me.
I think it would be good as an “opt-in” feature to placate anti-algorithm folks.
I am privacy conscious to an extent, but I’d be ok with data collection and “algorithms” if they are clearly defined and have a clear purpose. Masto being open source would for the most part satisfy my requirements for transparency…