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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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.
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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
You sound like you might enjoy TikTok more.
Yeah it’s either useless boring small talk on Mastodon, or zoomer tik tok. Absolutely no middle.
*useless only if you have no interests. There’s plenty of people talking hobbies and interests. If you’re just shooting shit, I agree, it’s boring. And no, there’s no middle. Maybe Instagram is the middleground?
It’s boring and shitty. It’s hard to find interesting stuff. Good luck finding trending/newsworthy events.
The amount of people on Mastodon who are like “ahh finally, nothing interesting to look at now that I left Twitter, I am at peace and can just scroll through pictures of someone’s dinner and obscure academic naval gazing :)” is so high
I think the #tuesday hashtag isn’t really what normal people talk about, but probably people gaming the system to get on a reliably trending hashtag.
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.
There are a few of us out there being weird. But it is very tech-heavy right now, as was Twitter at first.
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.
To be fair, I’ve seen so many like them on Twitter
And every morning (or like at 5-6 am when I was going to bed), the (not personalized) Germany trends were full of stuff like “Good morning”, “Hello”, and the names of individual people.
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.
Yeah same, it feels like being in a group chat with strangers. I’m glad it’s an option for those that want it though.
It’s funny how you can often tell a comment came from Mastodon because the way people type is just different somehow
mastodon users always type like they got that puffed out chest looking down at you
tbf, that’s just microblogging in a nutshell
That second link is great, thank you. From Twitter I learned that it’s much better to follow a few specific journalists rather than the news agencies themselves.
Thank you, I found this list very helpful! I’m also relatively new to Mastodon and still trying to figure out how all of it works. For some reason my mobile client puts #catsofmastodon first and foremost, making it my current cute pictures/ dopamine app ;)
Thank you so mucch!!! This honestly helped me alot with finding news. Didn’t even know press.coop even existed.
Happy to help!
Thanks for this, I was curious if certain news outlets were on Mastodon yet. Helps me a lot!
Does anyone know if mastadon people can be followed from a lemmy account? I think I saw a way but having trouble finding the post now
Most are twitter mirroring bots, which means it’s OK to follow but there will not be much engagement.
The ones in the spreadsheet aren’t just mirrors though.
Is #ThickTrunkTuesday not about men with large cocks? That sounds pretty exciting to me.
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?
Thank you, my point exactly. And it’s literally like this every day.
It’s weird.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.
I hear you. I just described Mastodon to my partner the other day as better than Twitter for my serious side but there is not a lot of light hearted fun to be had here :D and the breaking news aspect of twitter is also nowhere to be found, sadly. It’s still very niche and stuff like that doesn’t help
You’re kinda not wrong, and definitely not wrong about the breaking news part, but I’ve found a lot of lighthearted goofing about to do on there, partly from following silly bot accounts & boosting them, and partly from the more relaxed & imo better curated all/other server feeds of smaller instances.
On the larger instances it’s harder to find this good middle ground, especially if you go in without anyone in mind to follow. The other weird quirk to all this is that by default Mastodon is more private than spaces like Twitter, so people have to actively choose to tag their posts and enable features that might help others find them. Also, if you don’t have many remote followers, your posts won’t federate to as many other instances, and similarly, if someone limits who can follow them their posts (which may be fun & great) won’t travel as far. The latter isn’t a default enabled setting or anything, btw, but I think it may have a subtle effect on the general vibes of the space.
When that weird ass Wagner rebellion went down a few weeks ago, I followed the #wagner, #Prigozhin, and #russia hashtags and the news was just as up to the minute as anything on Twitter was. After the rebellion fizzled out, I just unfollowed the hashtags. I also happened to find some reliable accounts to follow that were knowledgeable about that part of the world.
I’m not even sure that any of those hashtags showed up in the ‘trending tags’ part of my app, though.
I was going to mention that if it’s still growing the user base there may be some less interesting tags, but damn. Yeah, those are just really dull in a random way lol.
The hashtags are near unreadable and almost never interesting. Please capitalize each word.
camelCaseForTheWin
#YouMeanPascalCaseNo?
You must be the change you wish to see!
I generally agree with this sentiment completely, but in this case the solution is beyond what I, as a single user, can achieve.
I’m wondering whether the hashtag ranking system could be filtered and tweaked to make the topics more varied and less boring.
Based on all the comments though, the reason seems to be baked into Mastodon’s design
It seems to be a clash of what two groups of users want since a few seem to be happy with how Mastodon does it.
Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.
Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?
I’d expect them to be… I don’t know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn’t finding it.
Oh hell yeah they are. I’m a tech enthusiast, myself. Don’t even get me started on Wednesdays because I’ll never stop.
It’s not that incredibly small
The culture of Mastodon is currently super dull. It’s gotten a bit livelier from the Twitter migrations and a little more sanewashed as more normal takes came in, but it’s still got that “heh, ate some lasagna today. nice” atmosphere.
mine are even worse, they should just gut the feature tbh
this is gen x level of entertainment, the same ones that preach no algorithms are somehow better
You don’t think the #tuesday chatter is exciting? For real though, I get the same vibe. It usually makes me close the app shortly after I open it. Maybe I’m not giving it enough of a chance.
When I first started using mastodon, I started believing it’s actually a tool to train people to stop using social media
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
