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

aleph@lemm.ee to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 354 points –

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?

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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.

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

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.

That would be ideal, but I couldn't find that setting anywhere