old following feed sucked, it needed to be done. it’s cool that people who miss the weird way it worked still have the option to keep using the same feed

idk that 'sucked' is fair - I wonder about the feel of the app after the change, like is discovery/engagement better/worse/indifferent but I do know that Elon picked a fight with Brazil specifically to make any experiment impossible to run

nah I maintain it sucked, I never enjoyed that method of using the app at all. anyway you’re kinda right wrt experimental conditions lol 😬

I realised last night that part of the issue is the conflation of "Following" being "a feed of your follows", vs "Following" being the "homepage" view that everyone from other networks expects to be _the_ feed (being unused to algorithmic choice). I think that creates tension and UX confusion.

Within the "feed of your follows" view there's separately deciding what it displays between two possible extremes: 1️⃣ Only posts from people you are following. 2️⃣ Every post from people you are following (with needed context). Old Following was closer to (but not) 2️⃣; new is closer to (but not) 1️⃣.

this doesn't hit the mark for me - I think 'Following' has a pretty natural feel as 'these are the people I want in control of content I see' One of the things bsky did differently is express that broadly, and it contributed a lot to site feel. The change makes it feel more like other networks.

That feel is completely consistent with my post. The feed has two inputs (user's declared Follows, and the posts by those Follows), and returns a view of those posts somewhere between 1️⃣ and 2️⃣. The position between 1️⃣ and 2️⃣ changes how much the user's input vs their Follows input affects the view.

Or rather (char limit) how much the user's Follows' input affects the view on top of the user's input (which is a baseline). I think the change feels bad to some users b/c they were unconsciously following a much larger crowd than they had clicked Follow on. Their user input was split across both.

I think one of the problems with the change is community bounds become 'tighter' - you used to have 'people you follow' and 'people you don't follow that regularly show up' - and that second group were brought to you 'naturally'. I wouldn't call that relationship 'following', but it is 'community'.