Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the elegance of algorithms, this started after I watched the video about maps alogrithms such as dijkstra's algorithm. Then I got to thinking realized why is mastodon and lemmy like media is so great. They essentially do not have algorithms to suggest you something -and therefore sell you something or sell others your data-. This thought is the main point of this essay.
I have recently spent so much time on traditional social media that I had to snap out of there at some point. It started with limiting my screen time but that did not seem to fix the core issue: we have so many choices. And you can pick you poison. But that does not mean there are only bad options out there. Because we feel the need to pick some media and go by and chat with friends and express ourselves or follow news, sports or interesting people, it is a fact that we cannot live without any type of media in today's world. For this reason I am eager to explain and look for different types media than we are used to. Like:
- mastodon
- lemmy
- peertube
For mastonod I like it the most of its algorithm. Compared to traditional algorithms it does not "push" you to new content at any given chance and it feels that you know every person on the platform that you follow, that is an important feeling: "personal", not by tracking our usage, data and by cookies but by human connection. For lemmy since it is alink aggreator it feels more connected as a whole in terms of the servers. Sİnce they are federated it does not make it easy for some servers to connect and see their content by the admins however, if you choose a more "all opinions welcom" type of server you should OK with the algorithm and what it makes you see. And for peertube it only works with who you follow (that is an option on mastodon and lemmy too but not strictly enforced but that does not mean mastodon is like twitter with unlimited content) and that is a good thing if you are looking for it however apart from other two federated media, in my experience peertube does not have easy access to quality videos or I could not find it anyways.
AI and Google, the showing dows our throats of the AI content on a very fundemental thing like a search engine makes you think that you are at the end of the human internet and any algorithm is just positive feedback loops onto AI content itself. And these corporates like google does not try to enforce strict AI filters on search results, that made me switch to Brave search engine if that is better.
Algorithms were not always like this. Take away of todays lecture should be that once upon a time (not far back in history), we meant clever mathematical structures that made engineering, science and excel and the world a better place to live as a human. Euler's algorithm, SHA algorithms, Fourier transform... all of these breakthroughs are in its core just an alogrithm found by a human being to contribute to the accumulated knowledge before them. Hence why should we contrict ourselves to how we can feed the most content to this specific person when thinking about algorithms. If we do that, it just means that we lost the war as humanity against the corporates in this day and age of perception.
stay knowledged, castiellon