How I populate my Mastodon feed
A week ago I joined Mastodon and soon faced a common hurdle: following enough interesting users to populate my feed.
It's not as easy as it seems as Mastodon has no algorithmic recommendations and doesn't support full-text search of toots. Although Mastodon instances come with a profile directory, this coarse filter lumps together mostly random profiles loosely tied by a generic match with the topics and themes an instance is about.
How did I get started?
I seeded my feed by browsing the results of hashtag searches for topics I'm interested in. This produced a handful of people to follow.
Next, for a finer grained filter, I browsed several more profiles from a number of sources:
- people followed by the users I follow
- people boosted or mentioned by the users I follow
- people who follow me, reply to, or boost my toots
- hashtag searches I monitor
- local timeline
When I came across a promising toot from these sources, I reviewed the author's profile for consistent posts with similar quality or themes. I discarded the profiles who only occasionally toot content matching my criteria and followed the others.
Now I'm following a dozen users. Although not many, these profiles are a good result after just a week. And the toots in my feed are enough for generating a compounding amount of relevant candidates to iterate the process.
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