One of the dumb things about Mastodon is that 90 percent of my feed is (still!) posts about how Mastodon is great.
The evidence of the greatness is pretty sparse; not a lot of fun things being talked about, not a lot of interesting reads. Just endless self-congratulation on the greatness of Mastodon.
@Ouij as I deactivated on Twitter I am enjoying the second hand stories about twitter. There is now baseball people on here too. I’ve tooted them
@Ouij @turtlensue I happen to think it's a temporary phenomenon. All the news is about El-ron and his tweeter cult. Once that dies down, people will just toot about everyday stuff, politics, and their interests. It is skewed for the moment because so many people are new here and exploring its quirks and features.
@swampudlian @turtlensue I'm not optimistic.
@Ouij @swampudlian I’m more optomistic . I’ve seen my feed start to diversify nicely in the past week or so.
@turtlensue @swampudlian If I didn't follow the #Worldcup and #MastodonFC hashtags my entire feed would be an unbearable torrent of "Mastodon is so excellent because it is Mastodon, with a culture made possible by Mastodon!" toots.
@Ouij @turtlensue @swampudlian You can diversify your feed by following hashtags. For instance, I follow #Genealogy #Geneadons and some other (non-genealogy-related) tags. Find your interests, and then you'll start seeing other topics. You can also filter out the posts you don't want so that you won't see so many of them.
@lmgenealogy @turtlensue @swampudlian I've been following a few hashtags, and it's been a nice change. But it's definitely a harder thing to manage.
I don't think I have enough computing power to train an AI to block all the self-congratulatory Mastodon pump-up posts
@Ouij @turtlensue @swampudlian There's a way to do it - I'll see if I can find it for you. Also, if you have specific areas of interest, you could find an 'instance' devoted to that and that would change the focus of your local timeline.
@lmgenealogy @turtlensue @swampudlian the local feed isn't my problem. If I want to see what else is happening, I hop on the federated feed and take a peek. That's...ok.
But if I could filter out all the Mastodon posts about Mastodon I feel like I could get almost everything in a daily email digest, lol
@Ouij @turtlensue @swampudlian Also, hopefully the "Mastodon is so great" posts will lessen with time, once people start to adjust.
@Ouij @turtlensue On the other hand, isn't that sort of your brand?
Anyways, this place is not perfect. No place is. It gives me an outlet for my social media interests. It's also changing rapidly. I do believe I'll ride the rapids here a bit more before I'm too negative about it.
As always, your mileage may vary.
@Ouij @swampudlian @turtlensue
I agree with Swampy. I do think it’s a matter of time. Just this morning, I’m noticing a marked uptick in engagement with toots about this World Cup football game. Even more than one week ago.
I have just been scrolling past all the “Mastodon is great” posts.
@swampudlian @turtlensue the architecture that forbids QTs and makes search impenetrable, coupled with a user culture that is convinced "It's good *because* it is hard to use," does not help matters
@Ouij @turtlensue The search thing.... That part is concerning to me.
@swampudlian @turtlensue the idea is that hobbling text search is a way to prevent stalking/harrassmentnt/abuse. Ditto the architecture against QTs and the norm against them.
For a newcomer, it's like being welcomed into a beautiful house with floorboards strewn with broken eggshells
@turtlensue there's an incredible amount of self-congratulation here, though.
This may not get fun unless or until it becomes easy enough for people who don't care about The Culture to join and start just writing things