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?

140

You are viewing a single comment

If you’re looking for news, follow some of the accounts here, and there’s a spreadsheet of journalists on mastodon here.

Don’t rely on trending hashtags, it’s not a useful feature on mastodon.

That second link is great, thank you. From Twitter I learned that it's much better to follow a few specific journalists rather than the news agencies themselves.

Thank you, I found this list very helpful! I'm also relatively new to Mastodon and still trying to figure out how all of it works. For some reason my mobile client puts #catsofmastodon first and foremost, making it my current cute pictures/ dopamine app ;)

Thank you so mucch!!! This honestly helped me alot with finding news. Didn't even know press.coop even existed.

Most are twitter mirroring bots, which means it's OK to follow but there will not be much engagement.

The ones in the spreadsheet aren’t just mirrors though.

Does anyone know if mastadon people can be followed from a lemmy account? I think I saw a way but having trouble finding the post now

Thanks for this, I was curious if certain news outlets were on Mastodon yet. Helps me a lot!