Does anyone here on #Mastodon know how to get more new posts into my feed?'nWhen I choose "Home" or "Trending", I can refresh over & over, and it's the same posts'ni can go away for an hour, then check back & refresh.

[worldtravelerall7@mastodon.world]

Does anyone here on #Mastodon know how to get more new posts into my feed?

When I choose "Home" or "Trending", I can refresh over & over, and it's the same posts

i can go away for an hour, then check back & refresh. maybe there are 1 or 2 new posts, but then the feed is the same

that cannot be right. am i somehow restricting my feed? i have no filters. what gives?

i've been on whatsapp groups with more activity than the Trending feed

what am i doing wrong?

[dominic@mastodon.green]

@WorldTravelerAll7 follow more people and hashtags, maybe

[worldtravelerall7@mastodon.world]

@dominic i don't follow any hashtags. i'll try that. thanks💙

[cobalt123@beige.party]

@WorldTravelerAll7 This is a long post. Read it if you’d like some ideas to try for yourself. There are 3 views you may chose to see at any one time. For Local the posts are only from your own Instance or those that are boosted or faved by someone on your own instance. If your instance is small you won’t see the local view change very often.

The Home view is a stream of all the people and hashtags you are following. If you aren’t following maybe a couple hundred people and or maybe 3 dozen hashtags, your Home view will not change very often. The more people you follow and later on mutuals (where you and another person follow each other) the more activity and changes of new posts you will see.

The Federated view generally moves fast and you may come to see there are hundreds or thousands of posts every hour! It is made of all the Instances your Instance sees and interacts with. Also be aware the Fedi view is the Wild West, sometimes it seems anything goes. If you are offended or insulted easily maybe avoid this view for a while.

There are thousands of Instances from all over the world that you won’t see because your own Instance doesn’t “see” them because members of your Instance aren’t interacting with members of other Instances. Your Instance only “sees” posts of people in other Instances if your members are interacting.

This is hard to understand at first. I happen to see in Home and Fedi view all kinds of African/indonesian/Japanese/German posts because the Instance I’m in in has members who are interacting with people in those countries.

I followed/follow people from far off countries and different time zones. Day and night I can check in to Mastodon as see lots of activity. When I have insomnia and browse my time middle of the night, my US mutuals are all asleep but I see all the Scottish and Germans posting like crazy.

When I first started I thought this whole Mastodon was very slow and boring, not many members. Then I found out I had to start following all sorts of people in many interest areas to start growing my Home view. When I comment often, even in posts of people who don’t know me, I started making friends. When I find friends who write interesting posts or share fun or interesting content or links, I may see they have threads going. Some of their friends seem interesting so I check out their streams.

Slowly I had about 300 folks I follow and maybe 50 followed me. Over time I posted more of my own content and also photos. People started finding me. If you don’t have a good bio on your home, many if not most people won’t look at your posts or follow you. If you have like 4 followers but you follow 4,000 then most people won’t follow you. If you haven’t shared at least a dozen posts that are public, most people won’t follow you. How would anyone know you are an interesting person or are you a troll?

I started following hashtags like #DogsOfMastodon and found great photos and great people but the only thing I knew we shared in common was just enjoying dog posts and dog photos. I followed more people I liked in this way and then some of them follow me.

Once I followed 1,000 people, wow, a whole new world I see. My Home stream now has about 300 posts an hour. My Federated view has 1,000 and hour. My local view has maybe 10-30 an hour depending on the part of day.

Long story short, give some of these ideas a try. If you do, I am sure you will find in 3-4 months it’s looking more fun for you *here*. After a year it’s great! After 2 years no one is going to drag you away from here because you have a world you never thought it could be like. At 3 years of being active, you will keep growing and things sure are worth it. Good luck!

[Guest]

@WorldTravelerAll7 @dominic

I saw your post because I follow #mastodon hashtag 👋

[Guest]

@cobalt123 @WorldTravelerAll7

that's the history of my fediverse life 🙂

The problem with fediverse, is that it looks like the commercial social networks, so most newcomers skip trying to figure it out how the different timelines works.

Except some rational people asking help 🙂