Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media

It's because the majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume, whether that's through a large count of follows or global search results or a discovery tab. In that case, you need some method by which to decide what subset of that content to show to the user. Chronological ("show me the latest 50") is one option, but is it the best, for however one defines "best"? The people running these things seem to think it is not the best, for however they define "best", so we see the various discovery algorithms and all their associated pros & cons.

> majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume

That is a group of users.

Another group of users follows only few active others and therefore sees only little content, but the platforms wants to show them something new all the time, to keep the platform "relevant" (in order to show more ads)

This then of course ignore the fact that they probably purposely follow only few.

Clearly the service is not designed for people to only engage with a few folks, it's meant to be a zeitgeist firehose. If you're only following a few people it's like using a spreadsheet for tracking household frozen pizza inventory.

I think one issue I see on Facebook is, it went from being very personal, to just being a mix of other social media norms. Which adds noise. If Facebook had a "Show me only relevant personal things" timeline, I'd use it. They used to let you define a custom timeline, where you group x number of friends, it was much nicer than the standard since I could weed out people depending on what type of content I wanted. I've stopped using FB for a while now though.

The "information overload" problem always seems like a problem invented by the creators of these platforms to project on their users and justify coercive behavior.

> That is a group of users.

It's the majority of users. Those who "follows only few active others" are a very small subset.

This is a spot-on, although incredibly weird, analogy for it. It only works if you use it. You get out what you put in.

This is a result of the algorithm. It also forces people who would prefer to only be following updates from an intimately curated group to have to pick what they've explicitly taken the time to select out of a pile of crap.

The tool might be more sophisticated than you need but following only a few people is totally fine and should not be overrun with algo content just to promote ad revenue to the platform owner. Maybe the people you want to follow are only on said platform so you are required to consume it that way.

A lot of it comes down to revealed preferences: people genuinely do just engage a lot more with algorithmic ranking. However I'm coming to believe the best algorithm at any given time is contextual - what content do you want to see? How much content is out there, and how much of it is within reach of your existing following network? Currently if you want to engage with stuff in a different mode, you just have to jump apps entirely, I'm hopeful Bluesky is able to serve a broader set of needs by just letting you pick what algorithm you're using.