Mastodon is the free, open, federated social media platform for Europe. It’s where you’ll find the official accounts from the European Commission, the german parliament Bundestag, newspapers like Le Monde and organisations such as Greenpeace. This is where you as a citizen would want your own country’s goverment, parliament, institutions and universities to make their official announcements and communicate with the public, just like is the case in Germany.
Mastodon is at this point not a platform to follow celebrities and influencers, and perhaps it will never be. This is largerly due to the feed on Mastodon not being governed by algorithms. All posts on Mastodon have the same weight or value. That someone has many followers and gets many likes doesn’t affect the visibility or spread of a post.
There is some interesting experimentation happening with recommendation algorithms elsewhere in the Fediverse, on another app which is a bit of a hybrid between Instgram and TikTok called Loops. This is still in alpha or beta at this moment.
What content will “trend” on Mastodon?
All posts on Mastodon have the same weight or value and are displayed in chronological order. This means that there’s not much value for celebrities and influencers who’re used to getting a massive reach on the algorithmic platforms when they post.
So if you think a post is interesting or valuable in some way, or silly or stupid, you boost it
But some accounts are of course more important and more visible than other accounts, but that’s determined by the users, not by an algorithm. Which posts get high visibility and and reach more people depends entirely on us, the users when we “manually” choose to boost certain posts. So if you think a post is interesting or valuable in some way, or silly or stupid, you boost it and when many people boost a post it will of course reach a wider audience. And it doesn’t have to mean you endorse the post, it means you spread it for others to also see it.
Liking a post by giving it a star has no effect on it’s visibility or reach. This is merely a way of bookmarking the post or letting the author and others who see it know that you saw it and felt it was worthy of a star.
So how do you “have fun” using Mastodon?
To get the most out of your Mastodon experience you should create a good feed.
There are primarily two ways of creating a feed with content that you find interesting or entertaining.
Don’t be afraid to just click away in abandon on that “follow” button as soon as you see an account that interests you.
One of these actions is to follow accounts that you find interesting or in some other way get you interested or entertain you. Don’t be afraid to just click away in abandon on that “follow” button as soon as you see an account that interests you.
The other way is to follow hash-tags. If you are interested in gardening, you do a search for gardening and then follow the hash-tag for that. All posts that were hash-tagged with that will then show up in your feed. The same goes for #climate, #music, #cooking and #EUpol and so on.
By taking these two actions you will fairly quickly get a feed in Mastodon brimming with content you’re interested in. Maybe even too much content? This is where my most important advice comes into play: lists.
Lists in Mastodon – the key to sucess
In Mastodon you can create lists with the accounts you’re following. This lets you organise accounts thematically (or in anyway you see fit) so that you can then “peek into” each of the separate worlds the lists represent.
I have a list for news with a frightful number of news organisations, such as: Politico, EU Watch, Euronews, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, The Verge, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Dagens ETC; Sydsvenskan, Aftonbladet and so on.
I also have a particular list with only my local Swedish news for quicker browsing.
To be sure that you don’t miss posts from accounts you particularly like, you can have a list called “Favourite follows”
To be sure that you don’t miss posts from accounts you particularly like, you can have a list called “Favourite follows”, which like the name implies contains a smaller subset of your favourite accounts. Other lists can be “Tech”, “Digital Sovereignty” and “Geopolitics”. Using lists in this way allows you to jump between different “flows” of content depending on what type of content you’re after in a given moment.
Mastodon itself also has a “tab” for “trending” with most boosted posts and most frequently added hash-tags. I usually never get around to looking at those, because there’s already so much other content I want to look at from the ca 800 accounts that I follow.
You can also silence accounts you find annoying. Or if there are accounts you want to follow but who post an ungodly amount of content and with a devious frequency – in effect spamming your feed. Then you put them in a separate list and call it “Too frequent” and configure the list to exclude accounts in the list from your regular feed. I do this for many news organisations who have automated publishing with high frequency. When I want to read news from these organisations I visit this list.
Finally, like in most apps of this kind, there’s the nuclear option of completely blocking accounts. You can both block and temporarily mute accounts without the owner finding out in anyway.
That’s it – Happy Mastodonting!
