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?
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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.
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 @[email protected] community aggregation account, every time you post something on progressive rock, you mention @[email protected] and your post is seen by everybody who subscribes to @[email protected].
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.
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 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.
There are a few of us out there being weird. But it is very tech-heavy right now, as was Twitter at first.
@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!
Can’t believe I haven’t seen this said here but check against other instances. Some instances have stuff in the trending tab set to manual approval. I’ve noticed this in particular with my trending tab posts section on tech.lgbt
This is so bizarre. Who is going around putting #tuesday or #wednesday on their posts? They want to capture the audience that wants to read more about what day it is?
From a brief browse, it looks like the day of the week is mostly hashtag spam, presumably for the purpose of trying to get noticed by using an easy and reliable trending hashtag. I saw one post about the Wednesday Addams TV show, but everything else was literally the day of the week. About half of the uses were in long lists of hashtags.
To be fair, that is kind of the original point of hashtagging on platforms without full-text search.
For categorisation.
Thank you, my point exactly. And it’s literally like this every day.
It’s weird.
removed by mod
oh my god I can’t fucking believe the gaslighters on this thread trying to counterargument an obvious truth
No egos, rage bait or dumbasses.
Sometimes I miss that though. I remember seeing a tweet a while back that said something to the effect of “twitter is boring until the unemployed people wake up at noon and start their shit”. Unfortunately, it looks like everyone on mastodon is a normal employed adult, which isn’t as fun.
this is threads now
ive noticed hashtags are not very popular likely due to them being overdone.
like lemmy, your mastadon exp is highly dependent upon your instance.
The UIs make adding hashtags difficult, and then Mastodon users (like me) say fOlLoW HaShTaGs.
The truth is that Mastodon needs better discovery tools built in.
You’re right, it is.
However, I’m on a server (fosstodon.org) that has an active Local thread and plenty of users and the trending hashtags still look like this pretty much every day.
for hashtags id say its just not popular, they have fallen out of favor in a lot of groups on twitter as well, for example if you want to know about AI research, not a single AI researcher worth anything is posting with hashtags. You have to find and follow them.
Mastodon being even more indie is just reflecting this growing preference. Hashtags are tools of marketers thanks to twitter and fb, they won’t go away but thier cringe factor in casual social posts is likely to stick around for a bit.
Isn’t that a problem for Mastodon, then, since it’s far more reliant on hashtags to drive discoverability due to the lack of algorithm?
maybe, communities and forums worked great for decades before hashtags became common. Some might say its a cope for cheap and poorly developed search algos soon to be replaced by much more sophisticated systems.
It’s fundamental to mastodon… you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can’t (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.
Groups seem to be the new hotness, though… there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
You don’t want to see some thick trunks on Tuesdays?
Probably lack of marketing. It just is what it is. If you want to see what the latest #dance is or #icebucketchallenge, that’s probably on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter…it’s easier for influencers to monetize their content.
Agree, and I think hashtags (or similar) are very important unless you are literally just interested in the current toots only, or you check Mastodon every minute.
Mastodon feels empty because most people probably aren’t using it as intended (following people you want in your timeline, following/using hashtags, etc). Also, it is empty compared to the popular platforms - they only have like 2M users which is a lot but not compared to Twitter or Threads.
The hashtags are also kinda useless in another way. For example, if you follow the hashtag “#music,” (or any music-related hashtag, really) your feed will be filled with bots that just post YouTube links. You can go through and block these accounts as you see them, but there’s so few people using the hashtag in a non-spammy way that you might as well just not follow the hashtag in the first place.
I had the same experience with #comics it’s just bots posting comic book covers. Makes it much harder to find stuff you want with the bots if there’s no algorithm
Bot accounts are supposed to register as such, and you can ignore them. As in ignore all bot accounts. If there’s a bot account that’s not flagged as one, you can complain to the instance admin.
That would be ideal, but I couldn’t find that setting anywhere
For a long while, before the twitter implosion, hardly anyone used them at all. My thought is it just never caught on for the most part. With the ability to follow tags now and more twitter migratees it seems to be more common to see them but still doesn’t seem as much of a standard practice as with other sites.
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.
…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.
Define “boring” here? If you mean “as full of shitposts and memes as Twitter and/or Reddit” then yes, you’re going to be bored on Mastodon. Since, however, I found those very posts boring as all shit on Twitter/Reddit, my feed suits me. A few hundred posts a day on topics that interest me, with about … say … 50% of them being somewhat insightful and/or thought-provoking. (The equivalent on Twitter was “however many posts the algorithm could shovel into my heap per day with about 0.01% of them being even slightly interesting”. For Reddit it was so low I never bothered with an account.)
I mean to each their own but I don’t think it’s boring.
But Lemmy and Mastodon are essentially the same thing in that they both make up the Fediverse.
“Also, Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to skew older, smarter, and more technically inclined.”
Get off my lawn *grumbles* *cocks shotgun*
So you’re saying I act like an old grumpy man but at a young age?
*shots cockgun*
What now? 🤨
Is #ThickTrunkTuesday not about men with large cocks? That sounds pretty exciting to me.
