I moved from Mastodon to this blog because of the 500-character limit. It is possible to bypass the restriction by switching to a patched Mastodon instance or another ActivityPub server without the limit, or work around the limit by turning posts into threads. Many users, however, don't do this. Instead, they post short messages, links without a description or review, screenshots of posts from other platforms, and memes. Low character limit turns out to be a problem not only for writers, but for readers.
I would rather have a slow timeline with proper blog posts or links to them, from authors that post infrequently. My home timeline in Mastodon was far from this goal.
First, I tried to solve this problem by muting accounts. I looked at my home timeline and whenever I saw a post that I didn't want to see, checked the posts of the user who made or boosted the post. If the latest few posts were not interesting, I unfollowed the user. If I was already not following, I muted the user.
I already had almost 400 muted profiles, but this did not help much. One of the reasons is that some posts I don't want to see appear in my home timeline not because I have followed someone, but because I have followed a hashtag. There is a feature request to show why the message is shown in the timeline. As of version 4.5.4 of Mastodon, installed on Fosstodon at the time of the writing, this was not resolved. In the comments for the issue it was suggested that Phanpy can display the followed hashtags when they are the reason for posts appearing in the timeline. I have tried Phanpy 2026.01.07.2e1d0c4, and it indeed displayed the hashtags, making it easy to unfollow noisy ones.
Active hashtags such as #privacy
have a lot of cross-posting accounts made for self-promotion.
Hashtag #tech is full of automated "... tech news" accounts
and "Hacker News" bots.
I have cleaned up most active hashtags,
but left the ones that are slow for now.
Some temporarily active event-related hashtags such as #39c3
and #fosdem are also useful during the events.
I also disabled the "Trending now" section
by going to the Settings and turning off "Show today's trends" option.
This disables the section that shows trending hashtags.
Before I disabled it, the first one was #Caturday,
followed by #ScreenshotSaturday.