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?
Oh man, you weren't kidding.
No egos, rage bait or dumbasses.
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.
You don’t want to see some thick trunks on Tuesdays?
is there a specific type of content you want? you can try following 'groups' instead of hashtags
the benefit of groups over hashtags is that you see posts from profiles that have not yet federated with your specific server since the group itself boots anything that is posted to it, so you can sometimes see things that hashtags miss
here is a website explaining it a bit more:
https://a.gup.pe/
to follow a group simply put whatever you want to follow before @a.gup.pe like so:
gardening@a.gup.pe
Probably lack of marketing. It just is what it is. If you want to see what the latest #dance is or #icebucketchallenge, that's probably on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter...it's easier for influencers to monetize their content.
For a long while, before the twitter implosion, hardly anyone used them at all. My thought is it just never caught on for the most part. With the ability to follow tags now and more twitter migratees it seems to be more common to see them but still doesn't seem as much of a standard practice as with other sites.
Pretty much my experience.
ive noticed hashtags are not very popular likely due to them being overdone.
like lemmy, your mastadon exp is highly dependent upon your instance.
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.
for hashtags id say its just not popular, they have fallen out of favor in a lot of groups on twitter as well, for example if you want to know about AI research, not a single AI researcher worth anything is posting with hashtags. You have to find and follow them.
Mastodon being even more indie is just reflecting this growing preference. Hashtags are tools of marketers thanks to twitter and fb, they won't go away but thier cringe factor in casual social posts is likely to stick around for a bit.
Isn't that a problem for Mastodon, then, since it's far more reliant on hashtags to drive discoverability due to the lack of algorithm?
It's fundamental to mastodon.. you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can't (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.
Groups seem to be the new hotness, though.. there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
Speaking of dullness why isn't there a like, comment or retweet counter? Just started trying to check out Mastodon.
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