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As a new user, I'm enjoying Mastodon's vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I've been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they're pretty much always like this.
Even on days with big news stories, people on Mastodon are only talking about what day of the week it is like company employees on some internal message board?
Is there anything that can be done to liven them up a bit?
Weird. I have exactly the opposite experience with Mastodon. Without the algorithm it's been great. I get the content I look for instead of the content some ragebait-mongering corporate entity thinks I need to see so that I stick around and click their ads.
I get more useful and/or interesting content on Mastodon than I ever got on Twitter before I ditched it.
Would like to see your feed because after months of tweaking and following hash tags, my feed is still boring.
Define "boring" here? If you mean "as full of shitposts and memes as Twitter and/or Reddit" then yes, you're going to be bored on Mastodon. Since, however, I found those very posts boring as all shit on Twitter/Reddit, my feed suits me. A few hundred posts a day on topics that interest me, with about ... say ... 50% of them being somewhat insightful and/or thought-provoking. (The equivalent on Twitter was "however many posts the algorithm could shovel into my heap per day with about 0.01% of them being even slightly interesting". For Reddit it was so low I never bothered with an account.)