I should probably apologize to a few people on the Fediverse for double-follows or weird Mastodon noise, but I’m not entirely clear on what kind of noise a small experiment might have generated. If you know me and noticed a weird follow, it’s because a quick automated trawl of my timeline flagged you as low-noise, high-signal for photography-related stuff and dropped you into my Photographers list.
The reason for the trawl was to get back to a practice I used to follow a long time ago where I’d wake up in the morning and load up Flickr’s “Explore” feed in Flipboard and make myself flip through it for a while. It was a little hard to do some mornings, but I stuck with it, adopting a mindset of:
- You don’t have to like all of it.
- There are better and worse choices, so figure out why you think which is which.
- You’re not as good as a lot of these people, but you do your thing for your own reasons, not Flickr’s (or anyone else).
- Figure out why things work or don’t work for you. Don’t do the things that don’t work, learn how to do the things that do work.
I think this is just basic self-development for people, I just had to learn it for myself because … well because.
So the trawl was to find accounts with a high percentage of media-only posts along with the absence of a list of stopwords in their posts, and the reason was to put them in a Mastodon list so I can wake up my Exposure Therapy approach, just using Mastodon instead of Flickr Explore. I just looked in on Explore, and it is about the same as it was. I think it could serve the same purpose, but I think the photography I see on Mastodon is a little more to my general taste, but not so much I’m closing myself off from learning opportunities.