Mastodon’s latest update makes it easier to follow the news
Lists in the Android app are a small but handy feature.
Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter / X alternative, is adding lists to its Android app, according to a blog post from CEO and founder Eugen Rochko. Lists are available as part of the most recent Mastodon for Android update.
I'd really just prefer a recommendation algorithm. I tried curating it for months and I rarely go on mastodon. Because I'm either seeing 100000 posts that I'm not interested in to find one decent one, or reading posts from the very few people I know I like and closing the app in 2 minutes. I'm honestly not a fan of the purely chronological approach.
An algo requires analyzing user data, which is exactly what the fediverse doesn't want. There are front ends that surface popular Mastodon posts, but that's about it and that's how they like it.
Everytime I say this, I get gaslit into being told it's actually way better this way! It's boring as hell lol.
Same. And I really gave it a chance, but it's just not better unless you're using it as a small chronological feed of people on your local instance. Which I know some people enjoy. I know interesting people and posts are on there, I know there are hilarious people on there, because I follow some of them. But the vast majority of them I discovered by random chance, it took a long time, and I'm still too bored by the app to bother opening it. Not to mention, if some important news is trending, I don't see it right away. Which is something I'd always valued twitter for. I could pretty much be "in the know" within seconds of opening the app.
The people are there, the content is there, there's 100% a discoverability problem
Fediverse in general really needs to adopt the multireddit approach to feed categories, or in other worlds let us group them properly. Sometimes I want to see news, sometimes I want to hear from some content creators and other times I might want to see what my friends are up to. Keeping it all in one feed (even worse if it's just chronological) is just a terrible way of handling it.
Dunno if lists are quite that but maybe we're finally moving towards it at least.
we already have this feature on the Tusky app but I'm glad Mastodon is adding it to the native app
Huh, admittedly I've only been on Mastodon since Juli, but I remember always having had the Lists function, or at least since I joined anyway... I've been classifying certain topics in Lists together for a while now, while they all stay in my home screen... I really hope the update isn't that it now removes them from home to "declutter" the only tab that gathers everything you follow for bored scrolling? That would be terrible...
This is specifically for the Android app
So it only added a base functionality that others already had at least 4 months late? 😅 They should call it Mastodon Explorer. 😅
The update adds the option to remove accounts on a list from to declutter the home feed. It’s off by default
Optional is always a good thing. 😅
Lists are kinda useless, because you have to follow everyone you put in a list
I thought this as well, but I've started to think they could be useful if I follow way more aggressively, and create a list that is "what I want on my feed" and default to that. It's stupidly cumbersome, but would have the desired effect. Of course you're right that they should just let you add directly to a list - I think the reasoning for the current functionality is to limit stalking/harassment, though I don't exactly understand how that is inhibited at all.
You have to give up any global feed though
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter / X alternative, is adding lists to its Android app, according to a blog post from CEO and founder Eugen Rochko.
“With the new update, you now have the ability to create custom lists and categorize your follows based on specific topics or interests, while removing them from your home feed,” Rochko writes.
The feature is coming to iOS, but according to spokesperson Renaud Chaput, “we are currently refactoring the app to solve some performance and crash issues, so the work is taking a bit longer than on our Android version.”
Rochko adds that “our iOS and web teams are also working steadily on new features and improvements.”
I had a handful of lists on X, formerly Twitter, that I used to rely on quite a bit; they were a really handy way to get updates from people and accounts you didn’t want to always show up in your home feed.
But even though X isn’t the platform it once was, Mastodon, which is powered by ActivityPub, is facing fierce competition from other Twitter alternatives like Bluesky (which is building its own decentralized social networking protocol) and Meta’s Threads (which has promised to eventually integrate with ActivityPub).
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Chris Jericho has never been happier