Had several questions about how the main "Home" feed works on Mastodon. Here's what it shows:
1. All posts from all accounts you follow in chronological order, newest at top
2. All posts shared by accounts or groups you follow
3. Posts that use hashtags you follow in chronological order, newest at top
...and that's it, there's nothing else on your Home feed. It doesn't push anything else at you, it doesn't hide anything from you unless you ask it to. No algorithms, no ads.
@FediTips Do you know if there is any place where it's shown (or at least stored/served in the API) in order of arrival, as opposed to chronological order of post/boost timestamps? Or will e.g. Mastodon's web UI always reorder posts to keep timestamps in order?
They're usually delivered immediately so there wouldn't be much difference between arrival and chronological order?
The only time I've seen a difference is when a server is overwhelmed and doesn't have resources to deliver immediately, you may see its posts arriving with older timestamps at the top of your feed. But that's pretty rare.
@FediTips Ah, I just did expect/assume out-of-order given the federated nature.
For bigger delays, yes, it can be in such situations (and that may have been the case several times with @njsg@social.sdf.org), but I'll make a note to double-check if there's any reordering or not in this (web) client, I just want to be sure I'm not missing anything if some interface shows it by timestamp order 😄
(To further explain, personally I'd really prefer if Mastodon, instead of endless scroll, had a concept of read and unread posts (the two aren't directly related but probably came in hand in the UI design choices?). More like a netnews client, less like Twitter; in lieu of that, I just assume (as in hope) newly received posts go at the top.
But I guess we're still fighting the 500 char limit from upstream... (not an issue on this instance, thankfully!))
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but you might want to try the Phanpy web client at https://phanpy.social
It took some of its inspiration from email.
Mastodon has an API open to anyone who wants to write an app, so there is a much greater variety of clients than Twitter etc.
«All posts shared by accounts or groups you follow». Including shared replies?
@FediTips
Yup, posts and replies, anything that they share.
@FediTips Is there any way to limit posts from certain users? I like Cory Doctorow but he (re)posts wayyyyy too much and it spams up my timeline so I unfollowed him. Can I just see every fifth time he posts or something? Or only the most popular post by him that day??
For the posts he's sharing (boosting / reposting) you can switch off his boosts. Go to his profile page, click "mute boosts".
For his normal posts, there's unfortunately no direct way to limit a specific account except to mute it or block it completely. A workaround in his case might be to use Mastodon's filters system to hide posts that contain the phrase "long thread/" (including /) as he uses this for his megathreads. More info on using filters at https://fedi.tips/filtering-your-timeline-to-hide-posts-on-mastodon
@FediTips Thank you so much! I didn't know about the filter system. Super helpful!
@FediTips @chrisjdfast I’ve seen him specifically recommend muting “Long thread/“
Thanks, I've added it to the advice 🙏
And boosts unless you hide them.
@FediTips One thing I can never quite figure out when I'm viewing a post is, what order are replies shown in? Sometimes I think it's threaded, with original author replies first and then by newest - but sometimes it seems in a random order. But then I wonder if that's just because I haven't figured out the threading properly because it's really hard to tell which post any reply is a child of. Are replies even meant to look like they're threaded, or is that obscured on purpose?
(Web interface)
Yes, replies should appear as threads, but Evgen hasn't implemented this in the web interface. You can use browser #userscript to display comment threads in the correct order.
Yup, there are threads but it depends on which app you're using whether these are displayed clearly.
For example the iPhone app Toot! shows the threads using a railway map style:
@FediTips can we put hashtags in a list instead of the home feed?
Yes*
You can go into settings and enable the hastag tab.
Put the hashags you want to appear in there. You will just have a feed of those tags.
*It doesn't remove tags you are already following. They will still appear in your home tab.
So you will have to unfollow, and add them in the hastag tab manually.
I have tags I follow like art or mossadon, so they come up in my timetable.
For other topics I want to only see when I am in the mood, I put them in the hastag tab.
There isn't a hashtag tab as far as I know?
Are you talking about adding hashtags to a column in the advanced web interface?
@FediTips @CuriousMagpie
Hmm, checked webapp, and a few others. Looks like you are correct. Had thought I had seen it there, but am wrong.
Using Tusky app has a hashtag tab.
In Megalodon, you can edit timelines and add hastags.
But they seem to be in saved in the app, not in account.
Ahh, interesting! It's good to hear about this being a feature in Tusky though, thanks for bringing it up 👍
It is very useful.
No, unfortunately you cannot add hashtag follows to the list.
Johan's right, you unfortunately can't add tags to a list. This is one of the most requested features so the developers know there is demand for it.
If you're comfortable using Github you can give it a thumbs up at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7692
@CuriousMagpie @FediTips @johan
I’m aware that you can add URLs to an RSS reader to get feeds for particular Mastodon accounts (I’ve not used this yet). Can one also do that for hashtags?
@Red_Shirt_no2 @CuriousMagpie @johan
Yes, you can add .rss to the end of the web URL for a hashtag search to get its RSS feed.
That shows you the feed for that tag viewed via the server where you did the search.
I had the impression that trending hashtags are different from one server to another. Tags that appear on my server differ from tags that show up on a popular Brazilian server (bolha.one) for instance. Is that so?
@peaoPerdido that's true.
Trending areas show top public posts or hashtags from the host site's connections.
Toot.cat and datasci.social, for example, have different connections. So they don't collect the same public posts.
Yes, different servers have different views of the Fediverse. There is no single centralised list of trends.
@FediTips And I adore it!!!
@FediTips how does trending pick posts though? is it the most engaged with posts or what?
Trending is most shared new posts. It only shows one post per account to prevent popular accounts overwhelming the list.
