How do you not feel overwhelmed using Mastodon?

I guess I don’t understand the mastodon/twitter style feed, I’ve always found that I couldn’t seem to get a feed interesting enough to come back to.

This is one reason (among many, sadly) that people abandoned or never bothered with Mastodon, and chose Bluesky instead. e.g. the latter has a "Catch Up" feed, for the most popular posts from the last 24 hours (so full of AOC stuff today:-). I check this occasionally throughout the week now, even without having an account there, to know what's going on.

But I vastly prefer the (Threadi-)Verse style of Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed. For comments, I love how they are sortable in terms of popularity of reception, rather than having to scroll endlessly through the list until you arbitrarily decide to stop. And for posts, grouped by community, although PieFed offers categories that bridge those together. So if you want News, on X/Bluesky/Mastodon I suppose you'd have to use an appropriate hashtag or follow a news-type account, while on the Verse (especially PieFed's categories of communities) it's just all right there together.
- Something cool to note is there's an interface for Mastodon called Phanpy with a Catch Up feature.
  
  It allows for a more granular look at posts from the past from what I gather.
  
  @fediverse@lemmy.world
I agree. My brief Twitter usage was following bars, restaurants, and music venues to see happy hour specials and upcoming events.

I think the main idea is to look at some hashtags to find people to follow, then eventually wean off those hashtags if you want.

Another key detail is that you can’t read it all. Not hashtags, not people. You’ll go nuts if you try. It’s about following people who are interesting, opening the app every once in a while to check in, then going on with your day.

Because some accounts like to spam on certain hashtags, I had the best results with muting an account the second I thought it was annoying. It's nothing personal, I just don't want to see their posts on my timeline anymore, which is what mute accomplishes

This is key to a calm timeline on Mastodon (as it was on Twitter): Mute accounts liberally — and mute hashtags as well. There will be a maddening amount of noise, and since there is no algorithm on Mastodon, it's up to yourself to focus in the important stuff.

It is complicated. I follow almost 500 accounts often producing 50 toots per hour. Nobody should spend that much time to catch up with all. My coping tools are:

Making lists, including one for important accounts I don't want to miss. Sadly I cant find a way to get notifications for those.
Resisting FOMO. Remember, mastodon is people-centric, not topic-centric like Lemmy. I don't try to use it as news source or catch all hashtags I care of. Just treat it as a space to casually look what people are talking about.

In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water. We should have resisted their harmful use, lack of transparency and user control, rather than the very idea. Controlling what content shows up first and setting your priorities is a good thing. Users should have this power, not corporations and not even admins.

Definitely agree that the the common-with-Mastodon viewpoint of exclusively using chronological feeds seems to have over-corrected too far. Can you imagine if the threadiverse was sorted that way? It would be insane and essentially unusable at scale - so we can at least acknowledge that sorting algorithms have a useful place and are not some unsalvageable, irredeemable evil. I wish there was something like a bunch of open source algorithms which the user could choose between in whatever UI they're using. At the very least there should be some acknowledgement that I, the user, don't have an identical level of interest in every account I follow, or even in every topic which the same account posts about.

And while microblogging platforms seem to have it worst, there have also been times in the threadiverse where I've subscribed to a community/magazine only to later unsubscribe because the activity levels it produces in my feed are much higher than my interest levels in it. So even here (where we have sorting by "hot" etc), some kind of user-configurable weighting would be nice to better match how I actually want my feed to work!

edit: typo
- Can you imagine if the threadiverse was sorted that way? It would be insane and essentially unusable at scale
  
  On lemmy there is a way to basically do this by toggling the filters at the top of the top of the front page. You can see how this looks form my instance: https://programming.dev/?dataType=Comment&listingType=All&sort=New
  
  I've always assumed nobody every uses it like that. I guess if you were bored you might get lucky and see something that interested you, at least if it was limited to Local and you were on a good instance.
In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water.

I agree. As long as the microblogging side of the Fediverse has only a chronological feed I can't see myself engaging with it. Mastodon just demands way too much work from the user for what the payoff is, at least to me.
Great comment, agree!

I felt the same way every time I tried to use Twitter as I feel every time I try to use Mastodon. It's either way too much or way too little. I prefer everything about the reddit/lemmy/threadiverse style.

How would we even be having this conversation on microblogging? A bunch of reposts, with or without comments, disconnected from each other... So much nicer to have a "subject" line and a page where every relevant comment is presented.

Funny, I've mostly seen complaints that Mastodon is "empty".

Some tips:

Use high-volume hashtags for discovery, not for following.
Discovery: niched hashtags (e.g. #photography - >#birdphoto)
Discovery: accounts that use the high-use hashtags. Follow or mute
mute/filter "spammers" and "spammy" hashtags
Ditch FOMO, grow your feed slowly.
Look at boosted accounts from accounts you follow. Maybe they're interesting for you.

I never liked Twitter and don't like Mastodon. It's just a fundamentally flawed platform. But I'm glad it exists for those people.

Use https://news.feedseer.com/ to summarize your Mastodon feed. Works great.

I created lists of people I want to see what they post. I look through them. I get a wide variety of content from those lists.

I also created searches by hashtag and that works for me when I want to see what people are saying about specific topics. Works great.

No, I don't feel overwhelmed.

I put the noisy stuff in lists that don’t show up in my home feed. That way I can catch up on home, or open a topical feed when I’m looking to scroll more.

This so much. Lists make content filtering so much easier, both foot organizing as well as for filtering.

If you follow a generic hashtag it quickly becomes too much, what I do is follow people and very niche hashtags that I know it won't bring that much content into the feed but that I'm interested in.

basically I never follow any feed (be it Mastodon, RSS, Lemmy, newsletters, whatever) that is too high volume. If something is sending too much content I'll just unsubscribe/unfollow. So for instance Lemmy communities for news are soo overwhelming, I'd rather sign up for a newsletter with a selection of five or so important news for the day.

On all microblogging platforms, I just follow people and periodically pare it back to something manageable. The sweet spot for me is following 200 or so people where a handful post all the time (and are fun and smart) but most are just friendly people, experts who don’t have poster’s madness (but add a lot when they do post). And some bots here and there for weather or breaking news but I’m very selective there. (I only want breaking news alerts that are actionable like, “A natural disaster happened.” and not 20 posts a day about political drama.)

That strategy has worked for me since the days of Twitter. It ensures there’s content for me to read when I’m playing with my phone but not so much that I’m unable to keep track of it all.

I don't think it is that much for me, I kinda like "infinite content" what I don't like is being bombarded with content that is not in English or Spanish... Which I clearly specified within the Mastodon settings to be my preference... So I spend most of the time navigating through said hashtags feeds blocking users speaking in other languages 😑

It seems that the hashtags feed doesn't care about language preferences... Or the users posting don't follow the language rules or whatever.

It's probably users not setting their posts' language properly.
- Yeah, and I am the one suffering blocking everyone lol.
I use that to my advantage, being bilingual i follow ongoings in my country of origin plus locally where I'm living now.
- I am bilingual too, but I don't understand the other languages that show in my feed but Spanish and English.
  
  I don't have that issue with Lemmy, everything here is in English, and there used to be some Spanish communities (the instance might have died because it hasn't showed up in my feed for so long).

People keep giving the advice of following hashtags. That might be good advice for really obscure ones where you're almost guaranteed to be interested in anything posted, but I think it's terrible advice generally.

Follow users, and hide their boosts or unfollow them if it turns out they make your feed less interesting.

Using hashtags+ filters mostly.

[goes on mastadon]

random opinions:

Not saying I don't go in for it sometimes. But its a bit like Twitter. It feels like an entire auditorium talking all at once, to everyone, all at once.

admittedly i do, which is one of the reasons i tend to like bsky more.

don't get me wrong, mastodon is fun but there's just something about bsky that's so easy to use.

another reason why i like elk.zone

I don't have anyone suggesting to me to follow hashtags. Just the indication that it's a thing I can do if I want.

Given the number of hashtags I see in some posts (esp heavy hashtag users (whom I hate cause the post becomes almost unreadable)) I can certainly see the number of posts returned for any given hashtag could be instantly overwhelming.

I've never actually followed a hashtag so don't have much to say about that... Other than perhaps that maybe has something to do with why I don't feel overwhelmed on Mastodon. 🤷‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️

I just handpick and choose entities (people/news sources) to follow.

I create list/collumns and put users by their main topic as i would do in commumities. I also use hashtags to dicovers news content related to it but they often forgot to put it. 😅

So i follow around 500 peoples. Maybe more.

I think a lot of the responses here get at the fact that Mastodon does take a little time and work to curate a feed that you enjoy.

I run a little instance with a few active users, so I follow them. I don't tend to follow hashtags, but I check them out now and then to look for interesting posters. Browse the FediFollows account and https://fedi.directory/ . Use a hashtag or two when you post sometimes and check out the accounts that share or like your post.

Follow accounts liberally, but unfollow just as liberally they just don'tdo it for you. Eventually, you'll end up with something that you enjoy.

I don’t follow tags, only browse them from time to time and follow people. Also filters and mutes really help.