Before the recent Twitter implosion, Mastodon was a nice place. I typically followed others that had interesting things to share, which means, to me, ideas and projects that would better me professionally or personally. It was a joy to browse through my timeline in the morning and there was hardly a day when I didn’t pick up an interesting idea. But then Twitter imploded and Mastodon saw a massive influx of new people. This totally changed the equation for me.
Even though I didn’t add new contacts, my timeline suddenly exploded with posts of people complaining about this, about that and negative news was suddenly all around. I started to get more and more annoyed because the good and interesting stuff was drowned by those retweets. I was about to stop reading my timeline altogether, but fortunately I noticed that Tusky, my Mastodon app for Android, can filter toots based on a word list. If you use the app and haven’t seen this yet, it’s hidden in ‘Account Preferences’ –> ‘Filters’ –> ‘Home’. With just six keywords, my timeline is back to the way I like it: Interesting, informative, helpful and funny posts with all the negativity hidden away. Perfect, thank you very much to the makers of Tusky, this is awesome!