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

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?

harshvoldy,

I believe there are improvements on Mastodon that can be made to update trends faster, to create trends from words that aren’t explicitly preceded by # symbol, etc.

But anyways Twitter trends had become absolutely garbage in last 4-5 years, it was always some marketing team of celebrity making useless things trend, or some K-pop group, etc. Twitter trends stopped being relevant long back. Twitter Topics picked up the slack for a while before their algos started filling up topics with promotions and ads.

I am happy to let things develop slowly on Mastodon. As someone from Computer Science academia, there are plenty of privacy preserving algorithms that have been developed which could power things like trends or topics, etc. on Mastodon without resorting to endless data surveillance. But it will take time for those things to percolate into the platform. Slow but steady is the way to go!

cmat273, (edited )

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.

ricecooker,

Probably lack of marketing. It just is what it is. If you want to see what the latest is or , that’s probably on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter…it’s easier for influencers to monetize their content.

tootytootwoo,

The culture of Mastodon is currently super dull. It’s gotten a bit livelier from the Twitter migrations and a little more sanewashed as more normal takes came in, but it’s still got that “heh, ate some lasagna today. nice” atmosphere.

Brochetudo,

oh my god I can’t fucking believe the gaslighters on this thread trying to counterargument an obvious truth

WidowsFavoriteSon,

Good god. The number of people whining on this thread that Mastodon is solo boringggg.

Its not.

You are.

Within 2 weeks there,I had my feed filled with news intelligent hot takes and links to cool blog thought pieces. Without the snark and baitshit that was most of twitter.

Get a grip. Learn what a hashtag is.

jesus

tootytootwoo,

Ah yes I really got energized by the thrill and excitement of #misheardlyrics

Just an absolute rollercoaster that site

Laticauda,

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.

UnixPornViewer,

Oh man, you weren’t kidding.

mtcerio,

Agree, and I think hashtags (or similar) are very important unless you are literally just interested in the current toots only, or you check Mastodon every minute.

spaduf,
@spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Can’t believe I haven’t seen this said here but check against other instances. Some instances have stuff in the trending tab set to manual approval. I’ve noticed this in particular with my trending tab posts section on tech.lgbt

paddirn,

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

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

I actually use an ad blocker to block that section on the instance I use. “Trending” anything is of zero interest to me on any platform. It’s anti-interesting when it’s on a platform whose selling point is hand-curation.

mojo,

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

toasteranimation, (edited )
@toasteranimation@lemmy.world avatar

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dosidosankofa,
@dosidosankofa@kbin.social avatar

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

lohrun,
@lohrun@fediverse.boo avatar

This is an issue I’ve had with many social media sites, it can be really difficult to find content that is interesting to you. Sure the bigger sites will have some sort of recommendation algorithm but that breaks down at two places. The first, if you don’t follow or engage with enough content it doesn’t know what to recommend you (but how do you find content to follow and engage with if you are are new). The second, you start to notice a pattern with the recommendations especially on something like YouTube. I get recommended the same like 20-40 videos even when I mark “not interested.”

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