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?

  • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Because mastodon doesn’t have an algo that promotes division and controversial topics. These hashtags are what normal, everyday people talk about. Drama isn’t its strongest side.

    • Asafum@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy ““promotes”” upvoted stuff.

        Mastodon “Trending” is just stuff that wasn’t talked about, suddenly being talked about. That’s why constantly popular things don’t appear on Trending, but things like “BigBoobFridayWhatever” (or equivalent) gets trending (people don’t use the hashtag for a week, and everyone use it for that day). I see how they thought it’s perfect for world-wide events, but it just end-up being a bunch of “weekly” stuff.

  • CarlsIII@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The hashtags are also kinda useless in another way. For example, if you follow the hashtag “#music,” (or any music-related hashtag, really) your feed will be filled with bots that just post YouTube links. You can go through and block these accounts as you see them, but there’s so few people using the hashtag in a non-spammy way that you might as well just not follow the hashtag in the first place.

    • renlok@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Bot accounts are supposed to register as such, and you can ignore them. As in ignore all bot accounts. If there’s a bot account that’s not flagged as one, you can complain to the instance admin.

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    This is so bizarre. Who is going around putting #tuesday or #wednesday on their posts? They want to capture the audience that wants to read more about what day it is?

  • cmat273@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Mastodon feels empty because most people probably aren’t using it as intended (following people you want in your timeline, following/using hashtags, etc). Also, it is empty compared to the popular platforms - they only have like 2M users which is a lot but not compared to Twitter or Threads.

  • Laticauda@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I was going to mention that if it’s still growing the user base there may be some less interesting tags, but damn. Yeah, those are just really dull in a random way lol.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is #ThickTrunkTuesday not about men with large cocks? That sounds pretty exciting to me.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The hashtags are near unreadable and almost never interesting. Please capitalize each word.

    • PixelPassport@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Marxine@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        That really synthetises why I dislike microblogging so much: It’s a bunch of people throwing small-talk and rage bait everywhere, all the time.

        Considering a lot of people are really bad at conservation in every possible way, it also makes sense why microblogging is so much more popular than forum-like platforms.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    mine are even worse, they should just gut the feature tbh

    this is gen x level of entertainment, the same ones that preach no algorithms are somehow better

  • stackPeek@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know, but to me this isn’t really dull. I wonder if it is matched with actual current events? Like, for example, if an earthquake, #earthquake and similar hashtags will show on trending section

    • aleph@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Because there’s no algorithm so most content avoids clickbait and is spread organically.

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

    Edit: https://hashtags.fyi/ has a lot more variety, though.

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      …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.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Weird. I have exactly the opposite experience with Mastodon. Without the algorithm it’s been great. I get the content I look for instead of the content some ragebait-mongering corporate entity thinks I need to see so that I stick around and click their ads.

        I get more useful and/or interesting content on Mastodon than I ever got on Twitter before I ditched it.

  • ScOULaris@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Because it’s just an incredibly small userbase made up mostly of tech/privacy enthusiasts as of right now.

      • ScOULaris@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, that surprised me, actually.

        I just took Mastodon for a spin only a week or so ago, and it felt much less active than most of the communities on here do. Just my anecdotal experience, though. I couldn’t find more than a handful of Twitter-migrated accounts on Mastodon that I cared to follow. There just wasn’t much happening on there that I’m interested in when I last checked. I’ll look again.

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          because they nerf discoverability so hard. You wouldn’t be surprised they hate Lemmy and how it crawls instances so you can actually find their communities in the search feature. They strongly hate that for some reason, somehow about it hurting minorities or some shit. That tends to be their go to if you disagree with the hivemind’s stance on anything, that you must hate minorities.