You would need to remove the profit motive.

It was called newspaper back in the day. Printing something was expensive so quality must have been good, that people were willing to read it. And social part was provided by posting letter to the newspaper adress with a hope to be printed.

No, because a focus on quality would require defining quality and then curating the content through some kind of process that would not end up being ‘social media’.

Quality will never be defined by popularity, which is the entire focus of social apps.

Professional communities with invite-only registration, where invites are only distributed to people with high ratings. Also you can add higher barriers, like a requirement to write a valuable on-topic to get rating above a certain level, regardless of the comment rating level. Basically a self-moderated narrowly focused community with invite only registration.

Some fedi services have blocklists that look for keywords to auto-block from your feed. Its pretty neat! Might be something to consider.

Possible, but better not make it. When an algorithm has to promote something, there’s bias behind it, whether it’s a good intent or not. Even if it’s all good content, some other, also good content might be missed, because the algorithm or the authority behind the algorithm misses it.

In my opinion, Mastodon is perfect as it is. You see what you’re following. Or on the home page you see everything.

People should really really really learn to seek for quality content and develop a sense for quality and also to exercise critical thinking while trying to separate quality content from garbage. Pick what you wanna see and don’t let yourself be influenced by a stupid algorithm.

Just consuming whatever an app pushes into your face makes you a brainless zombie in the long term.

It can only tell quality by community engagement and mod pruning.

What a community finds high quality tho is always going to be the lowest common denominator.

So the general path is small communities that have members in sync with each other.

But their quality of content attracts more people, which lowers the bar of the community.

Like, the lowest common denominator is the natural state of a community. To raise it you need to hold higher standards for the members of the community, which is going to get everyone excluded talking about elitism.

And they’d have a valid point.

For profit companies will always choose the one that comes with the most eyeballs. So unless you’re charging people a membership fee, you’ll never see a publicly traded company choose that, and when they do it’s not about quality, it’s about who’s willing to pay the entrance fee to the walled garden.