A heuristic for choosing people to follow on Mastodon
Summary
Following my post yesterday about Finding ‘connectors’ in Mastodon, Ton Zijlstra was kind enough to point out his 2008(!) The key to his approach is “For me, social media ia all about conversation”, and like my more recent look, he was looking for accounts that had a fairly balanced follow/follower ratio. He coined a couple of more labels for people with extreme statistics: • Large antenna array accounts have a very LOW ratio, with a very large number of follows and few, if any, followers - these are people who Ton characerises as : "… one on one interaction is not your goal apparantly. You’re building a phonebook, or you’re soaking up a large collage of everything that’s being posted …" • A-lister was his term for the accounts with a very HIGH ratio, the ones I called either Just Famous or Broadcaster based on how many posts they made - Ton came to a similar conclusion about these “It’s the celebrity profile so to speak. You can use it as mass media then” A heuristic for choosing people to follow on Mastodon Combining my thoughts from yesterday with a little reflection on my current practice, and the added seasoning of Ton’s thoughts re-shared, I’ve come up with the following heuristic that I’m going to play with as a guide to my follow activity on Mastodon: • have a goal in mind for your use of Mastodon in so far as it relates to developing a knowledge network • follow promiscuously anyone who looks even slightly interesting • but be ready to unfollow at a whim too - let your gut be your guide • look at the ratio of : and the (aka Toots on some clients) • for accounts which have interesting content, a very HIGH : ratio and a reasonable number of posts (the Broadcasters), consider adding the RSS feed of their account to your feed reader, and unfollowing in Mastodon • for accounts which have a very HIGH : ratio and a LOW number of posts (the Just Famous), seriously, why bother?