@fastfinge@interfree.caSo as I went for a walk this morning, I was musing on my switch to Kagi, and hosting my own bookmark manager, and Mastodon, and so-on. One of the key things that make these services better, I think, is that they rely on intentional user signals. Three quarters of the websites I visit are totally unimportant. Most of the YouTube videos I view turned out to be neutral to bad, and I don't want to keep seeing more of them. Half the products I look at I have no intention of purchasing. But big tech slurps up all this low quality data and throws it into a big data soup. However: garbage in, garbage out, right? I think hyper-personalization isn't the exclusive domain of big tech. In fact, without big data, I think we can do it better. Because we're relying on explicit decisions that users made, with the intention of effecting their experience. So it's less data, but the quality is a hundred times higher. For example, I would love a fediverse client that can determine the posts that are most similar to posts I previously boosted, and let me choose to sort those to the top. I follow a few hundred active posters, and there's no way I can keep up with all of you. I know I'm missing super cool stuff. But to surface the cool stuff, we don't need big tech and data from millions of users. We just need to make better use of the personal data we already have about ourselves.