As a new user, I’m enjoying Mastodon’s vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I’ve been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they’re pretty much always like this.
Even on days with big news stories, people on Mastodon are only talking about what day of the week it is like company employees on some internal message board?
Is there anything that can be done to liven them up a bit?
Because mastodon doesn’t have an algo that promotes division and controversial topics. These hashtags are what normal, everyday people talk about. Drama isn’t its strongest side.
Are you saying that Lemmy does have those algorithms? Because this shit is never boring lol so many instances I never wanted to see or know existed…
Slightly related: how many freaking instances of “yiff” shit do we need!? I couldn’t believe I was STILL seeing it after I blocked like 7 separate instances lol
Lemmy ““promotes”” upvoted stuff.
Mastodon “Trending” is just stuff that wasn’t talked about, suddenly being talked about. That’s why constantly popular things don’t appear on Trending, but things like “BigBoobFridayWhatever” (or equivalent) gets trending (people don’t use the hashtag for a week, and everyone use it for that day). I see how they thought it’s perfect for world-wide events, but it just end-up being a bunch of “weekly” stuff.
I guess the reality is that I want at least SOME controversy. I don’t know why the only two choices have to be “fascism-enabling hellscape” or “nobody saying anything interesting ever.” There has to be at least some possible middle ground!
I agree. The Trending algorithm needs improvement. Luckily, we can do that ourselves.
I agree. I want to see people’s opinions on the news of the day. By the way, I recommend following @BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to if you want a little controversy. He was one of my favorite posters from Twitter & has gone all-in on Mastodon.
Wait, so the recent topics that occur suddenly on Twitter aren’t the normal things people talk about? So the hype on Twitter events are fake?
They are. But they’re also influenced by who talks about it, how many comments, replies, likes it has. How many people click on it. Etc.
On mastodon is just how many people used the hashtag in a short period of time.
yeah sounds like boring shit. I get that already from talking to actual people, not virtue signalling boomers on mastodon
the lack of algo reduces the quality of content to this garbage, but this is the same people who think more content is bad as well. I don’t want some breaking or interesting post to be hidden by some random person posting completely meaningless garbage
Yeah it’s either useless boring small talk on Mastodon, or zoomer tik tok. Absolutely no middle.
It’s boring and shitty. It’s hard to find interesting stuff. Good luck finding trending/newsworthy events.
tbh I really like mastodon but the userbase is incredibly boring
I disagree, actually. Scrolling through the posts on my local instance, I see lots of interesting posts and witty commentary on current issues.
It’s just that the trending hashtags don’t seem to reflect that at all.
witty commentary on current issues
Am I the only one who doesn’t enjoy the twitter-takes? Don’t get me wrong, I actually agree with most of the takes. It’s just that it all feels like they’re trying to one-up each other with the cleverest gotcha and it makes me roll my eyes. Maybe I’m just not the target audience for a twitter/mastodon style community
Big, noisy rooms promote this kind of behaviours. It’s also why comment chains on big Reddit subreddits degrade into memes, injokes, and other flavours of referential humour.
It’s all about being punchy and popular for Internet points, because otherwise no one is ever even going to read your words. They’ll just be buried in the noise.
I think the issue is that people nowadays have come to expect a certain degree of individualized feeds and discovery features.
There is probably plenty of content on mastodon that would be of interest to any given user, but the discoverability is kind of lacking - especially if you are used to Twitter’s algorithmic feed.
Search on hashtags. That alone gave me loads of useful and interesting content (to the point I had to make lists to separate them out into columns). Also look for community aggregation accounts. That’s a bot account that automatically boosts any post that mentions it. So if you’re interested in, say, progrock and there’s a @progrock@some.instance community aggregation account, every time you post something on progressive rock, you mention @progrock@some.instance and your post is seen by everybody who subscribes to @progrock@some.instance.
There have been a lot of creative ways people have come up with to make finding content easy. Start with the hashtags and you’ll find the aggregation accounts in no time.
I used to feel that way on Mastodon myself! Being immersed in mundane content felt more like Facebook w/strangers (kind strangers, at least!) instead of what I’d want from a Twitter alternative (fluid breaking news discussions, humour, even “viral” content). What helped me is aggressively following hashtags and users who post stuff I care about, cuz the Mastodon experience relies heavily on follows compared to Twitter — now my feeds are much more active and focused on stuff I care about.
It isn’t perfect though, and there’s much I miss about Twitter’s content/follow recommendation system. Like obviously we shouldn’t repeat the ultra-unethical aspects of that system (privileging “angertainment,” conflict, false information, hate content, etc). But I wish its good aspects (ease of finding other users who discuss what you like, democratizing who gets a “voice” in public discourse, allowing users to directly confront public figures/institutions when needed, etc) could be replicated on Mastodon somehow.
But I wish its good aspects (ease of finding other users who discuss what you like, democratizing who gets a “voice” in public discourse, allowing users to directly confront public figures/institutions when needed, etc) could be replicated on Mastodon somehow.
Besides that last point (as that depends entirely on getting those in the space to begin with), I think the first two come down to the Mastodon culture needing to shift a little to be less…Hesitant? That may not be the best word for it, but some of the discoverability and openness of discussion may be related to this culture of hesitancy to connect & post from some who have faced the brunt of bullshit & harassment on corporate social media.
There’s also the other side to this of an air of proactive rule/norm enforcement that itself makes folks uncertain of what’s okay to post or which way to post in some instances, which may be a misreading of the instance/space but sometimes it isn’t and though well-intended, doesn’t help a ton either.
@Kovu @aleph “You don’t know how to cook em!” /jk But really it all depends on what you interested in and if people even use # … do you know how many people joined due twitter fkups recently? Do you know how many use tweeter to mastodon conversion thingy to find old pals and use it as a message board instead you know… SEARCHING VIA # ? so yeah it can be boring if people don’t use # and only advanced users speak and search things. REally look at local feed and not only in eng! Translate it!
Another #wednesday another day of work, can‘t wait for #friday to come around!
-Mastodon user probably
The worst is the “good night” posts, I find it so cringey.
Posts like: “Can’t keep these sleepy eyes open, sweet dreams everyone”. It seems like mastodon is for people that love small talk.
That really synthetises why I dislike microblogging so much: It’s a bunch of people throwing small-talk and rage bait everywhere, all the time.
Considering a lot of people are really bad at conservation in every possible way, it also makes sense why microblogging is so much more popular than forum-like platforms.
It‘s kinda why I never warmed up to Twitter, it feels more focused on everyone posting their random thoughts on daily life and building up some public persona.
Anyway, I do enjoy their comments sometimes showing up in threads around here so it‘s not all bad.
It’s funny how you can often tell a comment came from Mastodon because the way people type is just different somehow
Thank you so mucch!!! This honestly helped me alot with finding news. Didn’t even know press.coop even existed.
Most are twitter mirroring bots, which means it’s OK to follow but there will not be much engagement.
Because there’s no algorithm so most content avoids clickbait and is spread organically.
Also, Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to skew older, smarter, and more technically inclined.
Edit: https://hashtags.fyi/ has a lot more variety, though.
“Also, Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to skew older, smarter, and more technically inclined.”
Get off my lawn *grumbles* *cocks shotgun*
…and we see the result of that, an incredibly boring community. No wonder so many people leave. Without an algo, it’s simply awful. That’s why Lemmy is already 10x more interesting with basic rating algo systems.
Weird. I have exactly the opposite experience with Mastodon. Without the algorithm it’s been great. I get the content I look for instead of the content some ragebait-mongering corporate entity thinks I need to see so that I stick around and click their ads.
I get more useful and/or interesting content on Mastodon than I ever got on Twitter before I ditched it.
Would like to see your feed because after months of tweaking and following hash tags, my feed is still boring.
