1/ I was lucky enough to soak in Twitter's data for years. So I could see what features people actually responded to, and which we just *assumed* they'd respond to.

Buckle up, I have some interesting news that you, as a Mastodon user, are going to disagree with.

People don't like reverse-chron timelines. (head explodes)

Let me explain myself.

2/ As a Mastodon user, you're waaaaaay more likely than the average user to love reverse-chron with no algorithm. It's one of the main selling points for Mastodon!

But it's not rooted in what we saw in seemingly hundreds of different #designresearch findings.

The reason Twitter almost died so many times at the start is that normal people aren't looking for an IRC or RSS experience. So people joined, got frustrated, and left.

It took THREE YEARS to turn users into "healthy users." That's bad.

3/ Designers love talking about #empathy , but it can be hard to walk the walk. What do you do when literally 97% of your users are saying "I don't like trying to curate a good timeline, and I don't like having to scroll to keep up with everything, and I feel like I'm missing out on the good stuff, and I'm confused?"

Bad designers say "Deal with it."

Good designers say "Hm. This is a problem to solve."

And that's where algorithmic timelines, guide, moments, editorial content, etc came from.

then I'm firmly in the 3% and give me a switch to turn that algorithm off