I feel like everyone suggests following hashtags, but depending on the hashtag, I find the content that’s being posted quite overwhelming when it comes to the amount of toots, and that it’s hard to get an overview. Anyone that relates?
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Because some accounts like to spam on certain hashtags, I had the best results with muting an account the second I thought it was annoying. It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to see their posts on my timeline anymore, which is what mute accomplishes
This is key to a calm timeline on Mastodon (as it was on Twitter): Mute accounts liberally — and mute hashtags as well. There will be a maddening amount of noise, and since there is no algorithm on Mastodon, it’s up to yourself to focus in the important stuff.
Use https://news.feedseer.com/ to summarize your Mastodon feed. Works great.
If you follow a generic hashtag it quickly becomes too much, what I do is follow people and very niche hashtags that I know it won’t bring that much content into the feed but that I’m interested in.
I created lists of people I want to see what they post. I look through them. I get a wide variety of content from those lists.
I also created searches by hashtag and that works for me when I want to see what people are saying about specific topics. Works great.
No, I don’t feel overwhelmed.
I don’t have anyone suggesting to me to follow hashtags. Just the indication that it’s a thing I can do if I want.
Given the number of hashtags I see in some posts (esp heavy hashtag users (whom I hate cause the post becomes almost unreadable)) I can certainly see the number of posts returned for any given hashtag could be instantly overwhelming.
I’ve never actually followed a hashtag so don’t have much to say about that… Other than perhaps that maybe has something to do with why I don’t feel overwhelmed on Mastodon. 🤷♂️ 🤷♂️
I just handpick and choose entities (people/news sources) to follow.
admittedly i do, which is one of the reasons i tend to like bsky more.
don’t get me wrong, mastodon is fun but there’s just something about bsky that’s so easy to use.
another reason why i like elk.zone
I don’t follow tags, only browse them from time to time and follow people. Also filters and mutes really help.
On all microblogging platforms, I just follow people and periodically pare it back to something manageable. The sweet spot for me is following 200 or so people where a handful post all the time (and are fun and smart) but most are just friendly people, experts who don’t have poster’s madness (but add a lot when they do post). And some bots here and there for weather or breaking news but I’m very selective there. (I only want breaking news alerts that are actionable like, “A natural disaster happened.” and not 20 posts a day about political drama.)
That strategy has worked for me since the days of Twitter. It ensures there’s content for me to read when I’m playing with my phone but not so much that I’m unable to keep track of it all.
When I was new to Mastodon, I followed everyone who might maybe have something interesting to say (e.g. open source projects that I’ve never used but found somewhat interesting).
Right now I have 43 tabs open on my phone most of which are links from Mastodon I haven’t yet gotten around to reading… I think you can see why nowadays I tend to unfollow more things than I newly follow.
I put the noisy stuff in lists that don’t show up in my home feed. That way I can catch up on home, or open a topical feed when I’m looking to scroll more.
This so much. Lists make content filtering so much easier, both foot organizing as well as for filtering.
Using hashtags+ filters mostly.
I think the main idea is to look at some hashtags to find people to follow, then eventually wean off those hashtags if you want.
Another key detail is that you can’t read it all. Not hashtags, not people. You’ll go nuts if you try. It’s about following people who are interesting, opening the app every once in a while to check in, then going on with your day.
I never liked Twitter and don’t like Mastodon. It’s just a fundamentally flawed platform. But I’m glad it exists for those people.
I don’t think it is that much for me, I kinda like “infinite content” what I don’t like is being bombarded with content that is not in English or Spanish… Which I clearly specified within the Mastodon settings to be my preference… So I spend most of the time navigating through said hashtags feeds blocking users speaking in other languages 😑
It seems that the hashtags feed doesn’t care about language preferences… Or the users posting don’t follow the language rules or whatever.
It’s probably users not setting their posts’ language properly.
Yeah, and I am the one suffering blocking everyone lol.
I use that to my advantage, being bilingual i follow ongoings in my country of origin plus locally where I’m living now.
I am bilingual too, but I don’t understand the other languages that show in my feed but Spanish and English.
I don’t have that issue with Lemmy, everything here is in English, and there used to be some Spanish communities (the instance might have died because it hasn’t showed up in my feed for so long).
[goes on mastadon]
random opinions:
Not saying I don’t go in for it sometimes. But its a bit like Twitter. It feels like an entire auditorium talking all at once, to everyone, all at once.
