There are two very distinct categories of content aggregation/social media: The ones where you primarily “follow” people/content creators (facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, whatsapp) and the ones where you primarily “follow” subjects (reddit, lemmy, slashdot, etc).
The ones that focus on people are much more prone to create opinion bubbles, polarizing groups, and the obnoxious “influencers”.
Of course in some cases algorithms (as in youtube) may take in account the subject of your subscribed content creators, and feed you other creators covering similar subjects, but when the focus is on people, chances are they’ll feed you similar opinions, not only similar subjects.
It’s easy to see the difference if you compare subscribing to a “r/news” channel in reddit/lemmy with subscribing to a “foxnews” channel in youtube/facebook. One of those will get you a wider range of point of views (despite possible mod biases).
So I really hope subscribing or following people never becomes relevant in lemmy, let alone having algorithms tailoring what is shown to me. I want to know other people’s opinions; not an echo of my opinions.
Back on Reddit, I followed people who made awesome ingame arts, so I never miss out on their content. I think that would be a good feature for lemmy aswell.
I think it’d be a risky route to take, as it creates the possibility of the general populace electing “lemmy influencers” and ruining it all.
Maybe a safer option would be to simply be able to add specific users’ posts and/or commented posts to your landing page (which could even be implemented in the front end), never collecting or keeping any statistics of how many “followers” people have.
