Mastodon has a new “year in review” feature in the style of Spotify Wrapped (and every other service that has copied it). Mastodon’s version includes how many followers you’ve gained, what your most boosted post was, your most used hashtag, and a count of new posts in the last year.
I stumbled on some of the discussion behind the scenes on GitHub and found it interesting. I think it’s still in beta, presumably to roll out in Mastodon before the end of the year.
I’m still not a fan of the popularity-based information, and I still have concerns regarding the performance cost of generating a large number of these reports, and regarding the fact this essentially holds (small amounts of) user metadata the user can’t remove unless they outright delete their account.
This resonates with me. In Micro.blog we’ve gone out of our way to avoid anything resembling a popularity contest. No likes, no follower counts, no algorithms that surface posts. Sometimes this holds us back and kills engagement, but we’re sticking with it.
Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko isn’t worried:
I really doubt that a number you can check once per year will encourage any kind of day-to-day behaviour change.
Note that not all implementations of this kind of feature have to focus on popularity. Overcast has added a way to share stats but it’s all on things you control, not what other people think about your content. Overcast focuses on stats like which podcasts you listen to the most. There’s a good discussion about how Marco Arment built this in Under the Radar episode 306.
Back to Mastodon. Tobias Kunze created a new issue to ask for more control, adding:
A big draw of Mastodon from the beginning was that it was more focused on building community and much less pushy about number-go-up thinking – see also fav/boost numbers being not immediately visible in the web frontend. This report, in contrast, is the opposite: It shows you “account growth” and “top x% Mastodon user” stats that I feel are detrimental to the reason people came to Mastodon.
The Mastodon team does really good work, in public. Personally I think this feature is a miss, but it’s not my project. I’m also more than guilty of working on fun diversions away from my product’s core features.
