It seems like Mastodon is losing its mindshare to #Bluesky among many academics.
I can't help but think this has to do with the self-imposed limitations of Mastdon — lack of quotes, ordered timeline, etc. Makes it less interesting to use, for no real advantage.
Sad, because the underlying decentralization is much more robust.
FWIW, Mastodon, out of the box, admits the following curated feeds:
Feed of everyone I follow (Home)
Feed of the local and federated firehoses.
Feeds of particular hashtags.
Feeds of one or more people selected from among those you follow (Lists).
I'm finding both useful, the former for discovery, the latter for not missing posts by people I like a lot, or who tend to mostly post on a particular topic area I'm interested in.
A nice feature of a List feed is the "Hide these posts from Home" checkbox, which allows me to partition all the posts on a particular topic, so I only see them when I want to, which makes my Home feed more interesting.
I'm so excited to share Mastopoet, a tool made by @raikas that allows you to capture Mastodon posts as beautiful images and share them across the Internet. This makes posts much more eye-catching in other social medias for instance. :bunhdheart:
*Romance is often viewed as smut's distant respectable cousin, but sex scenes are sex scenes, & we all have common cause in a puritanical world with growing censorship & deplatforming.