i think the fundamental issue with a feature like themed lists/groups for suggesting followers is that what you like or do has, in my experience, very little to do with what kind of person you are or if I'll like hanging out with you. I like game development & indie music, but guess what, there's a significant contingent of people who also like those things who are just fucking terrible.

the best indicator of whether or not i'll like someone is if my friends are friends with that person. the problem with this approach, though, is that sites structured like twitter and mastodon don't track *friends*, they track *followers*, and interpreting following as friendship leads to this awful one-sided clumping behavior where the people that get recommended are people that have a lot of followers, so they get more followers, so they're recommended more, etc

@lycaon well tbf twitter “solved” this by basing the suggestions not on who you follow but rather on how they tracking tells them you usually follow people, your inferred gender, age and interests, etc. Granted, it requires surveillance and it works like shit,

@wxcafe yeah I don't think that's a good solution for a federated system, plus inferring facts about me based on my extremely good posts is gross