What does following a user do?

Pamasich@kbin.social to Moving to: m/AskMbin!@kbin.social – 5 points –

If I follow a person, not subscribing to a magazine, what does that do for me? Do I see their posts/comments somewhere; if so where?
Also, do boosts factor into that or are they purely to bump stuff up in the algorithm?

5

There really should be a 'following' tab on the microblog section that shows the boosts and posts of the people you follow.

Maybe also customisable feeds that can combine magazines/communities, people & tags in whatever combination you want, like a combo of multireddits and twitter's lists feature.

Absolutely, and I see this as an eventuality given Ernest consciously chose to be this compatible with mastodon. I can't find it in me to demand it right now, but I would love it to be in the near future.

Right now, a lot of my interests are niche enough that the majority of people talking about them are doing so in the microblogs, but if İ actually follow any of them, it gets shunted to the sub feed and promptly drowned out by forum articles. Nobody tweets as often as every fedizen posts.

My only workarounds are deliberately checking each profile or searching the tags. Both work, but they're less convenient.

It depends on the laws in your country and to what extent you follow them. If you're ten or twenty metres behind, and it's only for a few minutes, you're possibly safe. But if you're hiding under their bed, then you have issues and need to seek attention now, possibly medical.*

  • = Sarcasm

My experience so far is that following other users has no functionality. Their content submitted in threads is not shown to me in my m/sub page. ETA: I don't use the microblog portion of the Fediverse and I feel very resistant to that style of social media.

It is nice to see who has followed me - hopefully this is seen as a group of like-minded individuals and not stalkers/haters, but with a very buried private messaging or direct messaging system, it's not like I feel like reaching out to these other users for a direct conversation.