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Tried to make a little Mastodon plaything that scrapes a curated set of local timelines to see whats hot on Mastodon.
I know the Trending Hashtags page exists on Mastodon but it never feels accurate to me.
Anyway, the thing I made isn't accurate either because there are so many bots posting using the same tags and its so much work to exclude them all.
Also, so many people don't add hashtags to their toots. And a full-text scrape is intense.
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@matt Your server admins/moderators can curate the list of trending hashtags, so it's not a purely algorithmic list.
@nikclayton I am the server admin of my server and don't curate the trending tags. Anything goes.
But it's still inaccurate because it's only content that my server knows about. And apparently that's not a lot compared to (waves hands) all the content out there.
@matt You might be interested in https://discover.holos.social/, and the API it provides /cc @HolosSocial
Side note: If you were wondering why it doesn't show a full 24 hours of data in the charts its because its not been running for 24 hours yet 馃檭
Once every 5 mins, it pulls the local timeline from all the listed servers and then de-duplicates any posts its already seen, then takes out all the hashtags from the remaining posts and tallies a count for the hour they were posted.
There's a bunch of generic tags it ignores (like "news" or "politics") and then updates the page every 15 minutes with the latest data, which is displayed as per the screenshots in the original post.
It's only running locally, but if I think the outcome is interesting enough, I might shove it on a domain somewhere so it can run publicly.
Hopefullying polling the local timelines every 5 mins isn't so intensive for people's servers. I tried to find a balance of what would be a useful dataset to show versus overloading people's servers.
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