That will only incentivize posting low quality worthless things in order to improve position and reach in comments. Might as well just charge them $8/mo for the privilege of making other people see their comments.

Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were suggesting (just a chronological timeline?).

The people I follow, bless their hearts, are more than capable coming up with viral range and engagement bait even given this scheme.

We literally had exactly this model on all social media platforms for years and while I certainly remember everyone had that uncle who posted everything he saw on Fox News and exchanges that made for awkward Thanksgiving dinners it wasn’t nearly as toxic as it’s gotten now, especially wrt strangers and bots.

This is how Mastodon works right now. I assure you, there’s plenty of this kind of content there.

This. People keep saying how the Fediverse is awesome and different. But everytime I go to sign up for Mastodon, I'm greeted with culture war rage bait and I decide against joining.

But it's not the case for me, how comes?

Surely you must willingly follow people who post this kind of content, or inflammatory tags? Because I think it's the only way this content can reach you.

> Surely you must willingly follow people who post this kind of content, or inflammatory tags? Because I think it's the only way this content can reach you.

Really? Right now, if I go to mastodon.social, I'm redirected to https://mastodon.social/explore and 3 out of the first 4 posts are people fulminating about "red states", "anti-racism" and "Twitter" respectively.

Similarly, if you visit certain instances you will be greeted with the polar opposite of that. The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others. If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

The strictly chronological approach seems to work fairly well as long as you only follow a few people but it doesn't scale very well.

> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

Which ones are less political? I went to a supposedly global and tech focused instance only to find US political slogans in the "About" page itself.

> If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

That didn't work on Twitter and I doubt it'll work on Mastodon. Neither of them have a way of categorising posts into topics. There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

> There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

Well that's a weakness inherent to microblogging, some people like it evidently (as seen by the success of Twitter). I don't and only got a Mastodon account because I need it to follow some work I'm interested in, and indeed I need to ignore posts I don't care about.

Following and ignoring tags helps, but it's not perfect. But it works better than on Twitter.

> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

The founding generation of Mastodon roughly overlaps with people who believe that everything in life is political. Moreover, that group roughly overlaps with people who believe that attempting to escape strident political rhetoric is itself a political action directed against whatever groups they are passionate about. Founding-generation Mastodon users have expressed concern about the Mastodon ecosystem eventually evolving out of the kind of concerns and way of writing that they have, to something more representative of the broader public.

Well I have to say I never really visited this instance directly, I just visited the main French one (piaille.fr) initially, and eventually signed up on the SDF instance but I just don't visit the "local posts feed", I only read what I'm following.

As far as I know my experience would be the same with any other instance, nobody has to read random posts by people who just happen to be on the same instance.

Well I certainly don’t have empirical data or anything other than my own experience of close to 20 years interacting with people online prior, the biggest thing that has changed as far as I can tell is the drive to engagement and introduction of algorithms to further that goal.

Of course there’s always has been and always will be toxic content but to me it feels like society is breaking down in a way that is unlike what was happening before and it seems largely driven by social media interactions.