While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as […]
One of Mastodon’s upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don’t suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance’s users, which won’t cover interesting things from other instances (unless they’re specifically boosted).
Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.
I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can’t stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.
It’s fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That’s all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.
Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don’t follow, on the topics you have an interest in.