Steven T. DennisMastodon’s limitations mean it relies more on its users to surface good content. Search doesn’t really work. There are far fewer suggested posts. QTs don’t really exist yet. Trending doesn’t really work. So boosting becomes the absolutely critical way for other people to find interesting things. IE, if you see something you like, boost/RT it, tag people who you think might be interested, etc.
James StantonBoosts on here are what will make or break Mastodon. If people can find other interesting people and content, they will stay and the site will grow. If its too much of a chore, they won’t. Other sites reward lazier social media grazing, and they surface content designed to maximize engagement, which often = lies, hate, stuff that enrages rather than enlightens. Mastodon just surfaces what imembers boost.
Rich Stein (he/him)@steventdennis A quick "how to" guide re. Fediverse and Mastodon widely distributed to potential users in media and government agencies at all levels & locations, would probably also increase the number represented here.
David Slifka@steventdennis that’s a good point but I dont think it will be that way for long. I expect there will be more and more digest products and eventually user-selectable algorithms that emphasize pro-social interaction rather than time-on-site/profit.
malena@steventdennis does not appear that you are doing much boosting! people with larger followings boosting > people with smaller following boosting
peter honeyman@steventdennis ugh, i dislike boosts bc the folks i follow boost many of the same things so i see the same posts over and over and over again. i’m hoping @ivory will help clobber redundant boosts.
@peterhoneyman I suspect that would be less of a factor if there was more content and more people boosting/replying rather than grazing.
Kate Mackenzie@peterhoneyman @steventdennis What's ivory? That link didn't work for me.
@Kmac it’s an iOS client
Phil@peterhoneyman @steventdennis you can follow someone but hide their boosts to avoid this.
"Visit the relevant person's profile, click the three dots icon next to the Unfollow and bell icons, and there's an option there that says "Hide boosts from @[username]".
That option seems to hide them not just from your current view of their profile, but also from your Home view as well."
Here's a screenshot from Tusky showing its implementation in apps. Hope that helps.
@Phil_C thanks, i’ve been doing that
@peterhoneyman good luck solving the annoyance,I also think you can filter all boosts on specified instances as well.
@Phil_C the updated ivory client tries to reduce duplicate boosts presented, so i just went through my following list and re-enabled boosts on the 10% or so for whom i had disabled them. fingers crossed.
Benjamin Ross@steventdennis @mtsw I discover new people to follow here through replies more than boosts. Also, a lot of the boosts I see are posts I've already seen, often 2 or 3 times before (a weakness of either the software or the federated model). Unless you have a very large followership, writing thoughtful replies is a better way to improve Mastodon than boosting.
@BenRossTransit @mtsw Replies are also very important. But I don’t think I’ll even see the conversation unless someone I follow boosts it into my timeline.
shaun@steventdennis @BenRossTransit @mtsw The one feature I really, really want here is to be notified about who interacts with my boosts.
A _huge_ driver of my participation on T was that I'd retweet something, people would reply to my retweet, I'd get notified of their replies, and I'd engage in conversation.
Here, I boost something and I have no idea whether anyone even _sees_ it, much less replies to it. Any interactions go directly to the OP and leave me out of the equation.
mtsw@BenRossTransit @steventdennis some of the clients being released apparently handle this issue the same way twitter does (show you RTed posts in your main timeline once and then not again). Not mine (Tusky) and I agree its exasperating and annoying to see the same post over and over.
Shield Maiden@steventdennis Searching via hashtags is good too.
@Judeet88 it’s ok but doesn’t seem to work for long.
@steventdennis "for long"...in what way? It surely depends on whether you're searching for in-the-news topics or something a bit more obscure?
@Judeet88 If you search on one of my hashtags, #FridayNightZillow only recent posts are included in the search. Which is a shame as it’s a weekly feature, so you have to go somewhere else to find all of them easily.
John “Mastodon“ O’Briant@steventdennis @Judeet88 When I search that tag, it goes back to about 10 weeks ago. Is it supposed to go further?
Paul Chambers🚧When I search the hashtag, the search results goes all the way back to your first mention of the #FridayNightZillow when you started posting regularly on Mastodon.
After a while, it took a moment after I reached the end for the older Toot posts to appear, but the next "page" scroll of toots were fetched in matter of 10 or so seconds.
Maybe so. I think I responded near the same day, and I follow the hashtag, so it might be cached differently on my end/instance.
The problem might be with journa.host not whitelisting the #FridayNightZillow hashtag in the admin's hashtag moderation because a simple search of your famous #FridayNightZillow hashtag on journa.host shows no results. So, other instances is caching only
If @info admin is reading this, they can whitelist it here: https://journa.host/admin/trends/tags
Debbie SeltzerWhat we need is to be able to easily set our own algorithms with maybe 3-5 hashtags we want to prioritize at any given time.
ProgGrrlOne thing I liked about Twitter in the earlier days were the algorithms for recommended similar follows and trending topics. If you’re new to the service looking for things to follow/read, stuff like that is very helpful.
At this point, I assume current users who are trying to convince their friends to come on here, are helping them a lot in this area to make the case.
Jose Gutierrez@steventdennis new user here. Using the Ivory app on iOS and discovery seems to be lacking as in easily finding new accounts to follow based on interests and topics. I’m sure it will get there but this will for sure limit switchers as Mastodon seems to be very power user centric.
Sean Murthy
Sean Murthy (@[email protected])
@sjkilleen True. I worry though that people won't unlearn the non-social habits they've already developed. E.g., I hope people reply and boost instead of just hitting Favorite or quote/sub post. I also hope people learn to follow the whole person and not insist/expect posts only on topics that initially inspired their follow. https://mastodon.social/@smurthys/109739269251464948
Russ Skinner@steventdennis The responsibility is ours.
Laure@steventdennis search on topics of interest is very hard here or on breaking news topics of interest. Need a pan-fediverse universal search.
David Binkowski@steventdennis I don't appreciate boosts when it's someone trying to treat this app like Twitter. I don't need every article boosted constantly from one single source, if that tracks.
Bruce E. H. Johnson
robert daniel pickard@steventdennis or it will continue to do it's own thing rather than cater to people who can't be bothered to change their behavior even in the light of supporting a platform owned by a dipshit fascist.
Christopher Cruz 
@steventdennis reading the string of replies and conversations spawning off this thread is fascinating, and for me highlights some of the bigger technical and cultural items that both help and hinder Mastodon: Feature sets, user experiences, and access disparities that are astonishingly different across apps/web; Not a lot of hand holding for new users to get started or get content served up to them; Half its users want to create Twitter 2.0 while the others want to create the anti-Twitter; And a general disinterest or disbelief in the “virtue signaling” that sometimes accompanies the migration to Mastodon. It seems like the competition has always been against Twitter, but from these observations it feels like Mastodon is actually much more like a Reddit masquerading behind a Twitter UX, and could potentially benefit from surfacing the best of each of those while avoiding the pitfalls currently engrained in both.
We're Not In Kansas AnymoreI'm slowly learning...
Daryl Bsomething@steventdennis I'm realizing that I'm stuck in my adversarial mindset of not wanting to share too much about what I like or don't like by mashing those buttons. But with Mastodon I'm not the product (and in fact pay directly for the service via donation) so I have to find my way out of that mental space. I hopefully no longer need to balance "helping(?) others via boosting" versus "the harm of feeding an algorithm that monetizes against me what interests I've expressed"
TrueBlueKew@steventdennis I worry that I will pollute other people's feeds with boosts of content that they have already seen. I know it happens to me - I repeatedly see boosts of (admittedly good) content, but it makes getting through my feed a bit more of a grind.
themitchcohen@steventdennis @briankrebs This. So much this.
Jon Udell@steventdennis I'm also finding lists to be very helpful! It takes effort to curate them, so far I've categorized ~200 of my ~600 follows, but now I can read what those folks say in a focused and intentional way.