I LOL'ed at your handle, @rngesus_wept.
@starbreaker Thanks! Is there some kind of signal for new arrivals in the instance?
@rngesus_wept I seem to be one of the people new Octodon.social users follow by default. You can unfollow if you like.
@starbreaker Interesting. I guess it's server-configurable or something? I'd have expected to at least see \@CobaltVelvet in there as the listed admin but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@rngesus_wept @CobaltVelvet You'd have to ask them. I'm sure they have their reasons.
@starbreaker What could be interesting is a server configured to make new users follow N existing local users at random (say, selected from those with at least K toots). It would encourage some form of community, I guess, but also has some backfire potential.
@starbreaker Yeah, I'd jumped ahead to the case where a new user may get a random feed whose content they really really don't want to be exposed to, but you're right that there are more general "failure" modes.
Oh well, might as well just mine the local timeline manually. :)
@rngesus_wept @starbreaker
it's mostly that some *everyone* don't want to be followed by random bot accounts when federation occurs naturally when everyone follows large amounts of people. People would rather follow a random person than have broken conversations.
@rngesus_wept I see two immediate issues with that:
1. Some regulars might not want to be default-followed by random newbies.
2. Some newbies might not want to be default-subscribed to random regulars.
Making these features opt-in solves the consent issue at the risk of making automatic following for new users irrelevant.