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@TechConnectify first, I agree with you that there should be a better solution.

That said, friend, this is clearly driving you nuts. Maybe turn on the setting to block notifications from people who don't follow you or, if that's not enough, from people who you don't follow. Then you can scroll through the replies on your own time instead of getting bombarded with notifications constantly.

You could also use a hashtag for yourself and subscribe to that tag so any post in your federation that uses it will show up on your feed. That could flood your feed ofc, but at least the people in it will be self-selecting for "people who respect your needs in your federation", you know what I'm saying?

I realize, these are jury rigged, ad-hoc solutions and better ones are possible. But these you can do right now. Otherwise you'll have to wait until someone volunteers their time to make the thing you are asking for. I have the skills, but unfortunately I don't have the time.

@hyenagirl64 I'm definitely spending too much time on this, but you don't need to worry about my mental health.

I am, however, steadfast in my belief that more people need to be thinking about this. Right now, I get the sense that there is a lot of denialism floating around this place because for many of the users that are in positions of power, they don't see the problems.

I have to put those problems in front of them. I wish more people did.

@TechConnectify I don't think you are wrong. Not in the least.

That being said, I think it is wise to keep in mind that that quality filter existed for twitter's bottom line and twitter had access to a lot of data because they saw billions of tweets. They tracked basically everything you and everyone else was doing on that site, and their machine learning algorithm was using all that data to decide what tweets you saw, with an eye to getting more people overall to look at advertisements.

Aside from the lack of data any quality filter built for mastodon would have, and the ethical dilemmas of building such a thing, twitter's filter was keeping you in a reply cycle. It gave you just enough notifications to stay engaged with your audience but not quite enough to make you quit. This was part of twitter's marketing strategy.

The extent to which that filter served your interests is, on a high level, coincidental, and it was built on a foundation of mass surveillance i.e. "big data"

@hyenagirl64 that feature was implemented because when you have 30,000 some followers it becomes miserable to use the platform. Every reply is signal which means that every reply is noise.

That is how it is here right now. And I'm telling you, and anyone who will listen, that this platform is miserable.

@TechConnectify oh absolutely, I'm not saying it didn't solve a real problem. I'm saying that the solution they implemented, where the notifications became more convenient for large accounts like yours, was only helpful by coincidence. of course, on twitter, large accounts are very important. In technical terms, you were a critical node in the social graph. What you did had big impacts. Making your life convenient, genuinely convenient, was a high priority. And I'm not saying that they didn't do something that benefited you.

What I'm saying, is that what they were also training you to use the platform a certain way. They were training all of us to do that. That's why "twitter addictions" are a thing.

Yes, absolutely, a quality filter makes a lot of sense for a large account. Also, not engaging with everyone makes sense for a large account. Twitter managed this for you in a way that benefited them and made it "feel good" to you. People build habits around that sort of thing

@TechConnectify I realize this may sound cynical or even paranoid, but I once pulled all the data from 1 in 8 people on facebook using public APIs for another company a decade ago without most of those people even knowing about it in order to build the exact sorts of things I am describing. Most of them hadn't even consented, their friends had consented on their behalf. Thankfully for my conscience, the management threw the project and the data away.

I’m going to try to explain one more time, and I say this as someone who had a serious problem with the Twitter app.

On Twitter, if you posted certain things, for example saying you were thing about leaving, the various curation algorithms on the site would adjust what you were seeing to try to get you to not do that. Based on how you specifically tended to react.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a paper clip optimizer that controls what you see.