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?
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.
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 outwit 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 @[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.
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.
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.