One of the main ways that decentralised social networking platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon use to advertise themselves is that they gives people control over their timelines. Bluesky's website highlights this as its primary feature, saying "Your timeline, your choice - Stay focused on your friend group, keep up-to-date on the latest news, or explore with an algorithm that learns what you like. On Bluesky, there's a feed for that." Mastodon takes a similar approach, and puts it front and center on the joinmastodon.org website, saying "Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see." Both platforms share a common critique, namely that Big Tech’s control over algorithmic feeds results in systemic problems, and both see a solution in giving people control over their feeds.
But examining the different approaches taken by platforms in the fediverse and ATmosphere1 shows that both networks take quite different approaches. Moreover, these approaches seem compatible with each other, and it's been surprising to me that no platform has really tried to unify these yet.
How Bluesky gives you choice
Bluesky is focused on giving people choice. Instead of one 'For You' feed with an opaque algorithm that Big Tech platforms have, Bluesky offers the users to subscribe to any number of feeds. New users start with a simple following feed, as well as an algorithmic feed, the Discover feed. AT Protocol (ATProto) allows people to create any type of feed, that others can subscribe to. Other tools and businesses have popped up to take advantage of this, such as Graze and Skyfeed. These tools give people the option to build their own custom feeds.
ATProto can be understood as one massive pool of data, that is publicly accessible to everyone. Users control their data, but it’s visible to any app. Every application build on top of ATProto takes a portion of that data, restructures it and presents it to the user via a client. A custom feed is effectively a application that is build on ATProto. It takes a small portion of the data of the entire network, and presents it to the user. For example, the News Feed is a custom feed made by an independent developer, which shows articles posted made by news organisations. It functions by taking only the Bluesky posts made by news organisations from the giant data pool that is the ATmosphere network, and orders the post in chronological order, and presents that to the user. Another example is the Moss Feed, which looks for all the Bluesky posts that contain pictures of moss in the entire network, and show those moss pictures to people who subscribe to the feed..
This gives us an answer as to what Bluesky means when the company says "your timeline, your choice". The choice is that people can choose which part the entire network they want to see. They can choose to see the posts from the accounts they follow, they can choose to see posts from news organisations. The choice is in the data, and people express that choice by using a custom feed.
Fediverse platforms and choice
Fediverse platforms take a different approach to user choice over their timeline. Mastodon2 gives a user three feeds, the home timeline, which is the feed of what you follow, and by far the most important feed in Mastodon. (Mastodon also a few other feeds, which are significantly deprioritised.3) Where Bluesky wants to give people control by letting them pick any subset of the entire data of the network to see, Mastodon wants users to only see the content you opted in by following. This is the user choice that Mastodon advertises with on their site, where they say that "your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most", meaning posts from accounts you follow.
Mastodon has a fairly strict idea of what content should be shown in your Home timeline: only content you follow. This is often the accounts you follow, but can also be hashtags. Nor does it have to be microblogging posts: Mastodon will happily show you content from other types of software, from WordPress articles to PeerTube videos to podcast episodes to RSS. As long as you can follow it via ActivityPub, it shows up in your Home timeline. It does not even have to abide by Mastodon's own restrictions: a Mastodon post is limited to 500 characters by default, but other servers can set different limits. A Mastodon server with a 500 character limit will still show posts with a much higher character limit. The only restriction is that it has to be content you followed, or got boosted by an account you follow.
Mastodon also has a stronger focus on control over the content in your Home timeline. As the Home timeline is so important, there are many ways for users to take granular control over what they see. You can mute accounts you follow for a time period (helpful if someone is live blogging an event you are not interested in), turn off boosts from specific accounts if they have a tendency to boost too many posts, and a variety of other features.
Other fediverse software takes this a step further: Phanpy is a client for Mastodon, with a unique Catch-Up feature. This takes all the posts from your Home timeline from the last few hours, and gives you the option to display them in any way you want. You can group the posts by Author, sort them chronologically or reverse-chronologically, only display boosted posts sorted by boosts, and much more. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform which shares quite some of the design features with Mastodon. It also has a strong focus on a Home timeline with content you follow, but with even more features to give users control over how the content on that Home timeline is displayed. The screenshot below displays the wide variety of options that people have to change how their Home timeline is displayed.
The wide variety of options that Bonfire gives represent the ideal vision of fediverse platforms on what user choice for your timeline looks like: the content you follow, with all the tools you need to organise that content.
Two approaches to a similar problem
Comparing these two networks, I find it interesting to see that their approaches to control over your feeds are quite different. Bluesky's approach is great for discoverability. There is a lot of posts on the network that I'm interested in seeing that are made by accounts that I don't follow. Custom feeds are absolutely great for that. Mastodon is great for giving me control over how I see the content I already decided to follow. There are a great many ways to shape and fine-tune my home feed exactly the way I want, and deal with annoyances as they pop up. Tools like Phanpy's CatchUp give an unparalleled amount of control that no other platform even come close to.
People have been looking for alternatives to how Big Tech platforms handle their algorithmic feeds. Bluesky's answer is to give people a maximum amount of control over which data they want to see, with fairly limited ways to control how that data is then displayed. Various fediverse platforms take a different approach: the only data you see is what you have deliberately selected for, with a maximum amount of control on how that data is displayed. That both networks have taken a different approach and focus on how to build better timeline, is a reflection on the belief systems of the people building these new social networks. Bluesky is focused on open and public data, and the custom feeds allow anyone to access that data. Mastodon sees the problem as that corporations control what you see, and as such only shows content that you have deliberately opted in to see.
What's interesting to me is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is totally possible to build a system that provides both: The discoverability of custom feeds, with the customisability of Bonfire's filtering system. It's what I'm looking for, at least.
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