Lisa Melton: The fediverse’s own algorithm

Lisa Melton is well known for her work on Apple’s Safari web browser and the WebKit browser engine that powers it, Adobe Illustrator, and Netscape Navigator, among other things. She’s also been an underground comics artist and pioneered using the Macintosh for information graphics at newspapers.

And in the fediverse, she’s also known for her curated stream of “boosts”.

She wrote about her experience on her blog.

On the Mastodon social network, a post or comment is whimsically called a “toot,” and re-posting or re-blogging them is “boosting.”

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I follow a lot of people. Over 7,200 as of this writing. (Which is still not enough!) So, my Home timeline is chock full o’ content. And it screams by fast. Which means I often pause it scrolling so I can actually read it. Or I temporarily disable showing boosts or replies to get some focus.

But I don’t just read toots from people I follow in my Home timeline. I add a lot of these folks to Lists. Lots and lots of Lists. Oh god, so damn many Lists!

— Lisa Melton, How I boost toots

I follow Lisa myself, and she really helps me fill up my self-hosted Mastodon instance with interesting posts. Without accounts that boost heavily, like herself, a single-user server can feel a bit more lonely, so her service is much appreciated.

And as a tribute, I figured I’d take a quick look at what it takes to be the “fediverse’s algorithm”.

Between June 21, 2023, when she created her current account, and June 18, 2024, when I collected the data, Lisa boosted posts from 2,182 accounts. Here’s a breakdown of the top 200 of those accounts.

And here’s a look at the ratio of original versus boosted posts.

This shows the amount of effort needed to help curate our fediverse feeds. But to me it also illustrates one of the many things I love about the fediverse, that it’s made up of people. There are no algorithmic feeds that can be played for engagement. No ads you didn’t sign up for. Just other folks, like you and me, wanting to connect.