GoToSocial - Content discovery
A month in on my GoToSocial and i do still miss the web UI of Mastodon and mods like Tangerine, Bird and now there's even Catppuccin for Bird by Jason. Needless to say i really enjoy nice UI. And i still debate the actual ”value” in me running this. Â
Anyway I keep seeing content discovery come up as a worry for some and I had a few thoughts about it.
Searching content can be hit and miss depending on client but Phanpy seems to always work when all else fails. So I keep it nearby at all times. Â
I did setup a second account on my instance that follows maybe thirty or
so accounts with a high percentage of boosts, overall activity and
engagement. Then followed a bunch of tag accounts (Ex:
@tag-photography@relay.fedi.buzz will follow #photography and pull in
posts containing that tag) and previously these were all on my main
account but as the functionality seem a bit buggy at the moment as it
surfaces old posts at random I ended up moving them to the second
account and on my main did a regular follow on all the hashtags and this
seems to work better.Â
Also now combining these approached and open
the federated timeline on my instance it is truly a mish mash of all
kinds of content i can browse through in case i run out of content on my
normal feed. Â
GtS does try in a best effort manner to fetch
replies and this does also help with discovery. Though as far as I
can tell it doesn’t do this preemptively in the background like
FediFetcher which unfortunately does
not work with GtS, instead GtS seems to do it when you open post
details.Â
So sometimes it seems to take a few seconds before
replies are visible when you enter a post details, other times depending
on client you might need to enter the post then exit and now when you go
back in you will see replies.
I have not done any
research whatsoever on this, I’m just guessing here based on my
observations.
So combining the second user approach, tag accounts, reply fetching and federated timeline i don't feel that i'm really missing out on much content wise. But then again i'm not trying to keep up with exactly everything.
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