I'm usually a bit confused when people say that following someone on social media means endorsing them in some way, or worse, when they act upon discovering that someone follows someone. Case in point: I accidentally imported Fedifinder's list of not just my birdsite's follows, but also my followers - and my timeline sure needs some curation now 😫
It did made me follow some great accounts I probably wouldn't find otherwise, so it's not all bad!
@dos well, since people having more followers are usually seen as more "valid" in an online discourse, I'd say that following does matter and does endorse them in a way. Maybe it's a problem specific to platforms with algorithm feeding you new posts based on your follower likes, but you mentioned 'social media' in general.
@mantis I see my timeline as a tool for me and none else. I may follow someone because I like them, or because I want to keep up with what they post for whatever reason. Cpt. Hammer followed Dr. Horrible's blog to see what evil he's up to ;) I'm pretty sure I follow bunch of people across platforms because of misclicks too.
But yeah, algorithmic boosts of visibility based on engagement don't help. I love that Mastodon doesn't have that and its UI intentionally doesn't focus on numbers either.
@dos Yeah, my only point is the algorithm, otherwise I agree, keeping tabs on evil people may be useful - that is, if you can stomach their post in your feed.
And I was singing Brand New Day yesterday, so that reference hit hard :DDDD
That said, I think that given good curation tools, an optional timeline consisting not of your follows', but your followers' posts could nicely augment already existing local and federated timelines. I've got more than twice as many followers than follows here on the fediverse and I'm sure there are some people I'd like to follow in there - it just isn't easy to browse through 100s of accounts 😞