01 Sep 2024 | ~2 minute read

I read this post on my RSS reader this morning and it resonated with me (and many other Mastodon user too, I bet). It's something that's been requested so many times, but unfortunately, I don't think it will ever happen.

Eugen, the founder of Mastodon, has taken steps in the past to remove the the local timeline from the official Mastodon apps. After a lot of push back, they relented and added it, albeit very hidden. Eugen commented on a Github issue about the topic:

The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app. They might have made sense for early Mastodon in November 2016 when there were less than 20k people total and all from a homogenous demographic but nowadays the signal to noise ratio makes them a liability in almost every aspect. I might write more on the topic on the blog.

But that signal to noise ratio is much less of a problem for smaller instances - Eugen needs to, I think, consider those smaller instances, like500 Social, and not just Mastodon.social. By introducing a feature like posting to the local timeline only, you're allowing for these self-contained pockets of the fediverse to flourish, but they still have the advantage is engaging with the wider fedi if they want to. It's win/win.

Furthermore, this would have the added effect of encouraging more decentralisation of the fediverse, something which I think has the potential to be a real problem in the future.

Thanks for the great post, Scott. I suppose we will just have to live in hope for this (in my opinion) critical feature.

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