THE SHORT PITCH Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too? If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should probably stay … Continue reading Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky – and hope you will, too! →
Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There’s no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I’m not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I’d rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.
There’s the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There’s trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.
There’s definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user’s activity on other social networks.
I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. That takes manual effort though, many people want a firehose of personalized content presented to them immediately.
As much as this service raises data privacy concerns I suspect that many people would use it anyone purely due to convenience.