[tormeh]

Agreed. One of my issues with Mastodon is that I cannot see content from people I don't subscribe to. Even if all of my follows like/favorite a toot, I won't see it. This is a flawed design. This is the main reason Twitter is better than Mastodon, IMO. It makes my Mastodon feed pretty calm, but it also feels a bit dead, which makes me wonder why I opened the app at all.

[donio]

You do see it if they boost the post.

Also, since 4.0 you can follow hashtags. Currently a restriction on this is that you only see posts that made it to your instance because someone else on your instance is following the author. So it works better if you are on an instance with many users or users with similar interests to yours. It works very well for my use cases, most of the content I see is through hashtag follows.

[egypturnash]

I love this about Mastodon. I hated that Twitter showed people who follow me what I was liking today, and I hated that Twitter constantly showed me stuff people I followed were liking.

If I want my followers to see something, I have to consciously make a post that says "hey check out this thing". It's great! I open Mastodon, look at what the people I'm following are saying or pointing at, and then I close it and get on with doing something else instead of spending half an hour being distracted by Shit Twitter Thinks I Might Like.

[vonnieda]

I don't think this is true. I see "Boosted" posts in my feed from people I don't follow. Maybe this is a server specific feature? I am using Hachyderm.io.

[jefftk]

This is a standard Mastodon feature. You will see post that people you follow "boost", but not things they only "favorite".

My understanding is that the Mastodon devs are trying to separate "increase the distribution of a post" from "give positive feedback to the post author".

[micromacrofoot]

yeah people can boost posts on mastodon (essentially a retweet), but you don't see the asinine algorithmic things like replies to people you don't follow (unless you go look for them)

I do like that there's no reply component to boosts though. You boost it up or not. No sniping.