a binary following/not-following model does not even remotely approximate how people build and maintain social relationships with other people
you don't treat, or give the same weight to interactions with partners, as close friends, casual acquaintances, or people you appreciate but are in a purely transactional relationship with (eg. artists)
i will die on a hill yelling about this! i would be able to follow so many more people posting different types of things if i could break the timeline into separate feeds - even just one for people close to me and one for whatever is happening when i have free time to look at it would be useful!
this is actually one thing twitter+tweetdeck did reasonably well (with list columns) although i think i would prefer it be more like a way of grouping people you follow than twitter's "stealth follow" model which some people were understandably kind of a little suspicious of
(yes i know about the following view - it's intriguing, but unusably bad on mobile for now, which is a dealbreaker)
anyway, see you in a few months when im awake at 4:20am (nice) and want to yell about this again
(or like, a dropdown with "bestie / friend / acquaintance / coolstuffposter", though that adds vagueness)
Say, a user you're acquainted with posts a lot. You like their posts generally but not when they fill your entire timeline.
On conventional social media, you can:
- mute them (sometimes with a duration)
- unfollow them
- turn off shares
But those are a little harsh, I still want to see their stuff, just less of it all at once.
None of them do a "hey i wanna see your posts just a little bit less" thing.
What if you could click that - button to give them a slightly lower chance of appearing on your timeline? Not hiding them completely- just a little bit less.
So basically, get the ability to assign weights to user profiles yourself. Maybe add a functionality that defines separate weights for certain keywords, so like twitter's muted words you can define of which subjects you want to see more or less.
Or something like a checkbox that shows you posts from people that your besties follow, given that they contain the keywords mentioned. Like twitter recommendations, but controlled. (discoverability solved???)
And then add filters to show just the "posts from people with the highest score only" (or "besties only") etc.
So I guess that's algorithmic, but just with a very large degree of user control.
and edit: on twitter you can turn on notifications for people of which you really want to see their posts and it'll give you a little chronological digest of what they've said and it's actually a really cool feature. i just wish I had more control or like multiple different lists for that.