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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.
BigBoobFriday has to happen.
Needs more alliteration. #MassiveMammaryMonday
#TitularTitanticTittyTuesdays
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*
Is #ThickTrunkTuesday not about men with large cocks? That sounds pretty exciting to me.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thank you, my point exactly. And it's literally like this every day.
It's weird.
This is an issue I’ve had with many social media sites, it can be really difficult to find content that is interesting to you. Sure the bigger sites will have some sort of recommendation algorithm but that breaks down at two places. The first, if you don’t follow or engage with enough content it doesn’t know what to recommend you (but how do you find content to follow and engage with if you are are new). The second, you start to notice a pattern with the recommendations especially on something like YouTube. I get recommended the same like 20-40 videos even when I mark “not interested.”
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.
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.
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.
The hashtags are near unreadable and almost never interesting. Please capitalize each word.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Kinda curious to what kind of content you expect to see more in Mastodon. The little I've looked at some instances, I've thought "so this is what a saner twitter looks like", which I agree, looks boring.
Then again, I've always found the idea of twitter boring. Too much noise