#byota — Public Fediverse posts

3/X “But there are algorithmic feeds for Mastodon?” — Yes, great tools exist, for example:

➡️ #BYOTA by @mala
➡️ #FediView by @adamghill
➡️ #Fedialgo by @pkreissel

.. but most are client-side. They can rerank your existing timeline, but can't make #recommendations from outside your follower bubble.

New blog post: “Building a Custom Feed on ATProto Part 2: Text-to-Feed with BYOTA and Embedding Similarity”

https://aittalam.github.io/posts/2025-07-20-text-to-feed-with-byota/

#BYOTA #algorithms #atproto

Uuuh the video of the #BYOTA speed demo at #fediforum2025 is online! :partyparrot:

https://spectra.video/w/xtZeTuwpYAqPszVBK1uULd

If you missed the event, check this page out for videos of keynotes and demos and session notes: https://fediforum.org/2025-06/ 🔥

Today I woke up then I used #BYOTA to build an algorithmic timeline on #Bluesky... A good 8 hours before #FediForum starts 😅 so there's something more I can bring there!

Nice facts:

- everything runs on a #RaspberryPi 5
- the diff with the https://github.com/MarshalX/bluesky-feed-generator example is ~10 lines of code
- I dedicated my experiment to PrideMonth and I got a fabulous timeline in return :BlobhajPrideHeart:

@powersource @tommi Yes AND I think the main problem is understanding where these algos will run. With ATProto it is a seamless experience but it requires you to have your own server, domain, and some technical knowledge.

I am working on #BYOTA (https://github.com/mozilla-ai/byota) to bring algorithms in the hand of their users (they run 100% locally), but it is still a PoC and I would like to find a better way to give ppl as much control as possible without leaving their current clients. Happy to chat :-)

#BYOTA (Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm)

«Most of us have accepted the status quo of algorithmic timelines designed to maximize our time spent scrolling through "everything-nothing content," as Davide aptly called it.

BYOTA proposes something different: a timeline that helps us find meaningful content, respects our privacy by processing everything locally rather than in the cloud, and puts control back in our hands»

https://kathleeninweb3.substack.com/p/your-digital-life-your-rules

New blog post: Building a custom feed on ATProto

https://aittalam.github.io/posts/2025-04-13-building-a-custom-feed-on-atproto/

(no, I am not moving to Bluesky, I just want to understand how generalizable #BYOTA is and break as many walls as I can in the process 🙂)

One thing I missed when writing the Blueprint post about #BYOTA was a more personal take about it. Well, here it is: https://aittalam.github.io/posts/2025-04-05-byota/

(If you are wondering about the Blueprint post: https://fosstodon.org/@mala/114202120125293155)

#timeline #algorithm #localfirst #search

I already talked about why we should own our timeline algorithms (https://fosstodon.org/@mala/113967540546211928 ) and promised a blog post soon… Here’s the long awaited post AND a whole new Mozilla.ai Blueprint 🔥

https://blog.mozilla.ai/build-your-own-timeline-algorithm-a-blueprint-2/

I chose the Blueprint format as a commitment to share my work better, with updated code, more documentation, Docker images, and a demo you can play with right now: https://mozilla-ai-byota.hf.space/

#BYOTA

This was #BYOTA, thanks for following this long thread! What you see here are some of the next steps I planned: in addition to natural ML extensions, I’d like to see it grow as a tool for people to experiment with different algorithms and easily share them, and for less tech-savvy people to use as easily as possible. For this to be true, I will invest some time in understanding how to bring this to fruition at protocol level, rather than a single application. Stay tuned!

So, what can you do with #BYOTA? The first thing is embeddings visualization. In these pictures you can see a 2D plot of embeddings calculated on four different timelines: home (blue, only people I follow), local (orange, all posts from my instance, which is fosstodon.org), public (red, federated posts from people followed by users of my instance), and the timeline that I got searching for the #gopher hashtag (light blue).

What does having a WASM-powered notebook mean? Consider #BYOTA: you can download it from its repo, pip-install its deps, and run it locally as any python notebook. But you can also deploy it as HTML+Javascript files, host it somewhere super cheap (coz the server won’t run any of your code), and people will be able to run it in their browser with no need to install anything else! Plus, this will work both with “my” algorithm and whatever alternative you might develop starting from BYOTA’s code.

In #BYOTA, we use #llamafile to calculate *sentence embeddings*.
If you don’t know what embeddings are, just think about them as numerical descriptors of your Mastodon statuses, which are closer (as in two cities’ coordinates being close on a map) the more semantically similar their respective statuses are. We’ll get back later to this with a more visual description. If you are interested in embeddings and wanna delve deeper, see https://vickiboykis.com/what_are_embeddings/ by @vicki.

I got back home from the amazing #SocialWebFOSDEM and while I am drafting a “Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm” blog post to follow up on my talk I decided to keep the momentum going with a thread about it. You'll find my code at https://github.com/aittalam/byota and the talk slides here: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5601-build-your-own-timeline-algorithm/ (a video with the recording of the talk should be available soon too). Now let’s dig into #BYOTA!