I saw this project, which aims to bring algorithmic feeds to Mastodon: https://github.com/fediway/fediway

It argues that “without efficient content-distribution, the "trending" page becomes dominated by mainstream content, while niche creators struggle to reach their audience”.

This is a terrible idea for myriad reasons, which I won’t enumerate now, but the most worrying is the foundational logic of “efficiency” that the people working on the project have internalised.

Even conventional business theorists like Henry Mintzberg have criticised efficiency as a framing that relegates social costs to the status of externalities and fails to engage with quality: https://mintzberg.org/blog/what-could-possibly-be-wrong-“efficiency”-plenty

This is precisely the wrong idea at an even worse time. We need to decide what we see. We need to slow down. We need to rediscover the creativity that only exists in inefficiency.