Why are Mastodon's trending hashtags so ... dull?

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

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!

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 think the #tuesday hashtag isn't really what normal people talk about, but probably people gaming the system to get on a reliably trending hashtag.

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

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 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.

There are a few of us out there being weird. But it is very tech-heavy right now, as was Twitter at first.

@Kovu @aleph "You don't know how to cook em!" /jk But really it all depends on what you interested in and if people even use # ... do you know how many people joined due twitter fkups recently? Do you know how many use tweeter to mastodon conversion thingy to find old pals and use it as a message board instead you know.... SEARCHING VIA # ? so yeah it can be boring if people don't use # and only advanced users speak and search things. REally look at local feed and not only in eng! Translate it!

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 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.

Thank you, I found this list very helpful! I'm also relatively new to Mastodon and still trying to figure out how all of it works. For some reason my mobile client puts #catsofmastodon first and foremost, making it my current cute pictures/ dopamine app ;)

Thank you so mucch!!! This honestly helped me alot with finding news. Didn't even know press.coop even existed.

Does anyone know if mastadon people can be followed from a lemmy account? I think I saw a way but having trouble finding the post now

Most are twitter mirroring bots, which means it's OK to follow but there will not be much engagement.

Thanks for this, I was curious if certain news outlets were on Mastodon yet. Helps me a lot!

@cupcakezealot @aleph

"Also, Mastodon (and the Fediverse) tends to skew older, smarter, and more technically inclined."

Get off my lawn grumbles cocks shotgun

...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.

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.

From a brief browse, it looks like the day of the week is mostly hashtag spam, presumably for the purpose of trying to get noticed by using an easy and reliable trending hashtag. I saw one post about the Wednesday Addams TV show, but everything else was literally the day of the week. About half of the uses were in long lists of hashtags.

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.

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.

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.

They have 2 million active users supposedly, 10 times bigger than Lemmy.

It's not that incredibly small

camelCaseForTheWin

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.

When I first started using mastodon, I started believing it’s actually a tool to train people to stop using social media

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

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.

Sounds a lot like how Lemmy communities show up on Mastodon. Maybe one day we can have the reverse as well (Mastodon groups showing up as communities)

The UIs make adding hashtags difficult, and then Mastodon users (like me) say fOlLoW HaShTaGs.

The truth is that Mastodon needs better discovery tools built in.

You're right, it is.

However, I'm on a server (fosstodon.org) that has an active Local thread and plenty of users and the trending hashtags still look like this pretty much every day.

there is, idk what's going on in your end

Are you signed in to an instance, or viewing without signing in? Apparently (and this may be a case by case situation), those stats aren't shown when one isn't signed in.

I can see them when signed in & I've clicked on a post though, mainly the favorites (likes) & boosts (retweets), whereas comment counts are sorta visible before clicking a post to view replies. I say sorta as if a post has multiple replies it just shows as reply icon 1+ instead of the exact count.

Here in kbin you have to know the whole long address

The @ of the person do you want to follow

The full @ of the mastodon server

That doesn't seem to be the case. For example, on the day that Threads was launched there was plenty of people tagging #Threads, but it wasn't mentioned in this list.

I'm doing that already.

Yeah I have a lot of people that I follow that provide me news, cool tech, black history, furry fun times, art, and just sillyness. Maybe the tags aren't what OP wants, but the idea is that they should then search tags that they DO want regardless if "popular"