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?

  • aleph@lemm.eeOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • DudePluto@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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

      • Kichae@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Heastes@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        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 @progrock@some.instance community aggregation account, every time you post something on progressive rock, you mention @progrock@some.instance and your post is seen by everybody who subscribes to @progrock@some.instance.

        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.