Picking up a bit on what @u2764 has been talking about...
The public timeline is what gives Mastodon value. It's what allows it to escape the chicken-and-egg trap that prevents new social networks from taking off, by giving the system discoverability.
But, as instances get bigger, the PTL becomes progressively more useless; not just because it accelerates. but because it becomes an anonymous crowd instead of a community. (Cont'd in replies)
Like, the influx of Argentine Mastodon is very illustrative of this. If you halfway understand Spanish like I do, you'll realize that in actuality most of those toots are actually profoundly banal; whether or not there is a language barrier, they are very much outside the wavelength of Mastodon's OG community. Since at this stage in the network's life, growth comes in bursts that are generated by spots of media attention, this will be a pattern with new large inflows of users.
People are going to talk about salience-sorting algorithms as a solution to this. Those people are bad, and wrong; algorithms for "relevance" sorting are, I'm pretty convinced, inherently evil.
The real solution is user self-sorting into instances that would operate as communities, which has already happened.
The problems with users splitting into the "right" communities for them, though:
1. Switching instances has way too much friction for anyone with an account that is even a little bit established.
2. Followbots were a mistake, as they make federated TLS indiscriminate rather than a curated reflection of the interests of local users.
@brunodias The followbots did provide a useful service, at least early on, by "force populating" the public timeline, esp. for smaller instances. But you may be right now - they may have outlived their usefulness.
Also, you're absolutely right re: relevance algorithms. No algorithm is going to be worth anything unless a) it has a very powerful AI and b) it knows you better than you know yourself (a scary thought!)
