Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server

I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already.

For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control.

As for ideas and feedback..

"follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time.

You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven.

As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that.

Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph.

[0] https://communitywiki.org/trunk

It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma.

Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet).

You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.

Should we follow people, or topics?

Hm I can see that but I don't think that aspect will receive all that much attention and it looks like the site as a whole has already sunk beyond repair and is sizzling out pretty fast even before the launch.

The way I do it is to follow the hashtags I'm interested in, see the people that post under it regularly and decide if they're interesting enough to follow. This has a chicken and egg downside, as these people won't appear at all if nobody on your instance follows them, which is unfortunate. :(

To circumvent that you can use mastodon social's tag page, but it's less user friendly. See here an example: https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub