The Internet has been hosting social conversations around discussion topics and common interests since at least the inception of Usenet News. Later, social networks such as Twitter (now X) added a layer of social networking that brought some structure to the content presentation. It now depended on which content creators were followed by each content consumer, with individual feeds merged into a common timeline for each consumer. A final step was to substitute the timeline with algorithms that sought to maximize engagement. A step that had dire consequences.
Imagine you regularly go to your favorite coffee shop and have quiet conversations with your friends. Occasionally, a new friend of friends is introduced and joins the conversation. Many tables are doing the same in an open space, and you can sometimes hear conversations nearby and maybe engage with these neighbors. This is a simplified analogy to what happened with non-algorithmic social networks. Now imagine that a table has a particularly polarized discussion, maybe arguing about politics, and the persons at that table start talking louder and more emotionally, now all the tables are hearing that heated conversation as it disrupts and replaces the quiet exchanges at each table. In the physical world, these disruptions occur, but rarely last long and normality resumes. With the algorithmic selection of content, permanently optimizing for emotion and engagement, these heated conversations will become the norm, and the quiet coffee shop can become a stressful and alienating place.
Platforms such as X and Threads might provide some sort of chronological feed while aggressively defaulting to the algorithmic feed that maximizes engagement. Having that default reduces the incentive for users to curate who they follow to have a high-quality chronological feed experience. Alternatives that provide a purely chronological timeline of who you follow are present in Mastodon and Bluesky. Both support a more open approach to social conversations based on open protocols, even opening the possibility for user-side management on how content is selected for the user feed. Mastodon is more federated; users can select which server to join; posts are propagated among servers that agree to interconnect. However, this creates some barriers to presenting a unified view of what happens across all servers. Bluesky offers a more user-friendly presentation that mimics the old Twitter user experience from the 2010s.