How to follow newspapers on mastodon without being spammed?
Hi,
I have a mastodon account and would like to follow some newspapers with that. I just did, but the newspapers are posting so much that my whole timeline is just spammed with their posts. Often also stuff I am not interested in.
Is anyone else here following newspapers on mastodon? How are you handling the spam?
It's a really good idea to use the "Lists" feature on Mastodon for stuff like this:
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-the-lists-feature-on-mastodon/
I follow a bunch of news that post a ton of content that I don't want cluttering up my usual home timeline. So, I've added them to a "News" list and excluded that list from my home timeline. This way, I can either view the list whenever I wanna scroll through the news or even add an entire separate column on the advanced web interface just showing that list with news that's separated from home.
I only discovered the Lists feature recently. It's a gamer-changer.
Similarly I used to follow news groups on Mastodon, but found I was missing stories in-between my other follows. I ended up switching to RSS readers like Inoreader to handle my reading instead.
I know it’s answer-adjacent, but I hope that helps.
I think this really is the best solution to news sites.
I self-host FreshRSS, make good use of its filters, and I can chew through headlines and articles in no time using the web view on a PC or mobile web.
News sites are better to consume via RSS feeds. Check out openrss.org that has feeds for a lot of websites. There are even RSS feeds for Mastodon and Lemmy.
There is no need to go through openrss.org for this.
https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/fediverse.xml?sort=New
There is if you want RSS feeds for things like Lemmy search. And if you want the links in feed items to be associated with a single instance. AFAIK, regular Lemmy feeds dont provide that. But ofc people can use Lemmy feeds if they want.
I think normal Lemmy feeds are all associated with the instance. What do you mean by Lemmy search? I know RSS has been around for ages but I'm always keen to make more use of it!
You can get an RSS feed for a Lemmy search term e.g.
https://openrss.org/programming.dev/search?q=cats
Ooh that's a cool one, cheers!
Better to use an rss reader for that. You can get rss feeds directly from every mastodon server I believe.
also lemmy communities, if there are some too high-volume to keep up with in your main feed: https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/fediverse.xml?sort=New
Are some of these posts, boosts as in reposts? There should be an option to hide a follower's boosts to prevent then from flooding your TL.
You can also hide replies and use key words filters to help keep your TL tidy.
Eta: links
Somehow get them to have a separate feed/account for each writer, as well as each section,
and only subscribe to those subsections of their output YOU care about.
I don't expect ANY newspaper to have the working-brains to understand this concept.
Enforcement/enshittification is the only religion which fits in the heads of "executives", nowadays, right?
Unfortunately, that's the proper answer.