this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you'll get likes and boosts.
And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it's quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.
Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.
"Creating your feed" is an essential part of of enjoying mastodon. Hashtags are the single biggest thing but also
How do I follow hashtags? I am using the official Mastodon app for Android.
You should consider switching to Megalodon. It's a fork of the official Mastodon app so it's already what you're used to but adds features like following and pinning hashtags as we as supporting markdown in posts (if your instance is using glitch-soc)
I will check it out, is following hashtags a client side feature or OG webpage supports it?
The web client supports it too, as do other apps like Tusky and Ivory. The official app is just a weird outlier.
@kratoz29 @Jerry as stated here: https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/
"The official Android app doesn’t yet support hashtag following", but you can use a different app that supports that feature. For example Tusky. :emoji_wink:
Thanks for the heads up!
200% this, I did not enjoy mastodon at all until I realized you could follow hashtags. Once you do that you find your people and everything clicks.
When you follow hashtags do they bring people from other instances to your feed? Or does the search only fetch things from your own instance?
Edit: spelling
The key word here is "connected" instances. You don't find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.
This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.
When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.
Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don't have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.
This has been very illuminating, thank you!