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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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?
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. 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.
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.
BigBoobFriday has to happen.
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?
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
It’s boring and shitty. It’s hard to find interesting stuff. Good luck finding trending/newsworthy events.
Removed by mod
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.
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?
To be fair, that is kind of the original point of hashtagging on platforms without full-text search.
For categorisation.
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.
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.
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.
error loading comment
The hashtags are near unreadable and almost never interesting. Please capitalize each word.
Is #ThickTrunkTuesday not about men with large cocks? That sounds pretty exciting to me.
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.
tbf, that’s just microblogging in a nutshell
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 @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.
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.
Speaking of dullness why isn’t there a like, comment or retweet counter? Just started trying to check out Mastodon.
there is, idk what’s going on in your end
