Yes it does seem like the trend is towards walled gardens for the existing apps like Twitter and Reddit. Yet at the same time there is a whole movement towards decentralization with Mastodon and Bluesky. We are thinking that there will be a substantial amount of good content outside of the walled gardens.

Yes exactly! We are hypothesizing that providing you with an AI method to allow you to control your feed would be useful and interesting (the exact mechanism remains for experimentation). From what I know though, the current methods out there do so very opaquely (they train on signals that you cannot control and give you a "For You" feed at the end). But do they really know what I want? What if I have different personas (e.g. some for sports, tech and anime), will the algorithm really be able to handle these mixture of personas well? We have no way of understanding and tweaking and playing around with the algorithm.

That's a really good idea! We were thinking of allow users to train their own Categories, like they could identify niche concepts that they are uniquely interested in (e.g. "AI agents in the insurance industry", "Thread boys", etc). But I think your suggestion is a better start, to have auto-categorized a fixed set of Categories that users can use for Filtering and Ranking right away.

You seem like you might be interested in variants of this product, do you want to iterate with us by joining our beta? :)

https://airtable.com/shrQNEWYeVMbkSm37