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by d110af5ccf 1028 days ago
Similarly, if you visit certain instances you will be greeted with the polar opposite of that. The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others. If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

The strictly chronological approach seems to work fairly well as long as you only follow a few people but it doesn't scale very well.
2 comments
OfSanguineFire 1028 days ago
> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

The founding generation of Mastodon roughly overlaps with people who believe that everything in life is political. Moreover, that group roughly overlaps with people who believe that attempting to escape strident political rhetoric is itself a political action directed against whatever groups they are passionate about. Founding-generation Mastodon users have expressed concern about the Mastodon ecosystem eventually evolving out of the kind of concerns and way of writing that they have, to something more representative of the broader public.

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unmole 1028 days ago
> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

Which ones are less political? I went to a supposedly global and tech focused instance only to find US political slogans in the "About" page itself.

> If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

That didn't work on Twitter and I doubt it'll work on Mastodon. Neither of them have a way of categorising posts into topics. There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

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seszett 1028 days ago
> There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

Well that's a weakness inherent to microblogging, some people like it evidently (as seen by the success of Twitter). I don't and only got a Mastodon account because I need it to follow some work I'm interested in, and indeed I need to ignore posts I don't care about.

Following and ignoring tags helps, but it's not perfect. But it works better than on Twitter.

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