> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people.

But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform?

Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, just different preferences. But Mastodon could still claim "We don't use The Algorithm and is therefore better than other places" while a platform with custom user-owned algorithms could get the best of both worlds.

That's not something that I have any interest in, but I'm not opposed to it as I know other people have asked about it.

A very quick peruse of the Mastodon issue tracker came up with information about this on the ActivityPub level (albeit in an old toot): https://mastodon.social/@reiver/113668493283013849 and someone kindly rounded up similar feature requests here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33098#issuecomme...

I like the idea of it not being related to a platform or implementer, but baked into the spec ala a feature of ActivityPub.

Such a platform is not a hypothetical: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds