I feel like everyone suggests following hashtags, but depending on the hashtag, I find the content that’s being posted quite overwhelming when it comes to the amount of toots, and that it’s hard to get an overview. Anyone that relates?
You must log in or register to comment.
It is complicated. I follow almost 500 accounts often producing 50 toots per hour. Nobody should spend that much time to catch up with all. My coping tools are:
-
Making lists, including one for important accounts I don’t want to miss. Sadly I cant find a way to get notifications for those.
-
Resisting FOMO. Remember, mastodon is people-centric, not topic-centric like Lemmy. I don’t try to use it as news source or catch all hashtags I care of. Just treat it as a space to casually look what people are talking about.
In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water. We should have resisted their harmful use, lack of transparency and user control, rather than the very idea. Controlling what content shows up first and setting your priorities is a good thing. Users should have this power, not corporations and not even admins.
In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water.
I agree. As long as the microblogging side of the Fediverse has only a chronological feed I can’t see myself engaging with it. Mastodon just demands way too much work from the user for what the payoff is, at least to me.
Great comment, agree!
-
I guess I don’t understand the mastodon/twitter style feed, I’ve always found that I couldn’t seem to get a feed interesting enough to come back to.
This is one reason (among many, sadly) that people abandoned or never bothered with Mastodon, and chose Bluesky instead. e.g. the latter has a “Catch Up” feed, for the most popular posts from the last 24 hours (so full of AOC stuff today:-). I check this occasionally throughout the week now, even without having an account there, to know what’s going on.
But I vastly prefer the (Threadi-)Verse style of Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed. For comments, I love how they are sortable in terms of popularity of reception, rather than having to scroll endlessly through the list until you arbitrarily decide to stop. And for posts, grouped by community, although PieFed offers categories that bridge those together. So if you want News, on X/Bluesky/Mastodon I suppose you’d have to use an appropriate hashtag or follow a news-type account, while on the Verse (especially PieFed’s categories of communities) it’s just all right there together.
Because some accounts like to spam on certain hashtags, I had the best results with muting an account the second I thought it was annoying. It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to see their posts on my timeline anymore, which is what mute accomplishes
