📢 “What are Community Feeds? Why has my post been boosted?”
You make a post, add a hashtag, and it’s immediately boosted by one of our Community Feeds - plus you get a notification. What’s going on?
We’re Newsmast and we’re all about knowledge sharing. We’ve built topical Communities, spaces that anyone can dip in and out of to get involved in the things they care about. Communities combine and curate posts from all over the Fediverse into an easy to access single source.
That’s why you’ll have seen us boosting your posts. You’ve probably used a hashtag our human curators think suits the conversations in a Community, or our curators have followed you from a Community because you're a leading voice posting regularly on a topic. Your post is then boosted into an organised space that people can see, if they choose to.
When you post with a hashtag, your post is pulled into a feed with all the other posts on that hashtag. What we do is keep it safe and on topic by adding extra layers of curation - all done by real people, not AI.
We add carefully researched accounts which post regularly on topic, but usually don’t use any hashtags. Finally, we cut out a lot of irrelevant content which comes through using filters and mutes.
For every 10 hashtags we might bring together, we’ll often have 50 or more filters in place, and a lot of mutes. Our human moderators constantly update and edit these filters too, to stay on top of the conversations. If you want to join our volunteer moderation team, let us know!
The end result is timely, informative content - including your post.
So why all the boosts and notifications?
We wanted to make our communities accessible to everyone in the Fediverse, without the need to use a dedicated app. We’d love to have the ready-made ability to create Community Feeds, but Mastodon and the Fediverse don’t have the built in tools to do this. So, we’ve adapted existing technologies to make things work.
