Fediverse @lemmy.world Sibbo @sopuli.xyz 6 mo. ago

How to follow newspapers on mastodon without being spammed?

Hi,

I have a mastodon account and would like to follow some newspapers with that. I just did, but the newspapers are posting so much that my whole timeline is just spammed with their posts. Often also stuff I am not interested in.

Is anyone else here following newspapers on mastodon? How are you handling the spam?

12 comments

It's a really good idea to use the "Lists" feature on Mastodon for stuff like this:

https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-the-lists-feature-on-mastodon/

I follow a bunch of news that post a ton of content that I don't want cluttering up my usual home timeline. So, I've added them to a "News" list and excluded that list from my home timeline. This way, I can either view the list whenever I wanna scroll through the news or even add an entire separate column on the advanced web interface just showing that list with news that's separated from home.

I only discovered the Lists feature recently. It's a gamer-changer.
Similarly I used to follow news groups on Mastodon, but found I was missing stories in-between my other follows. I ended up switching to RSS readers like Inoreader to handle my reading instead.

I know it’s answer-adjacent, but I hope that helps.
- I think this really is the best solution to news sites.
  
  I self-host FreshRSS, make good use of its filters, and I can chew through headlines and articles in no time using the web view on a PC or mobile web.
Better to use an rss reader for that. You can get rss feeds directly from every mastodon server I believe.

also lemmy communities, if there are some too high-volume to keep up with in your main feed: https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/fediverse.xml?sort=New
News sites are better to consume via RSS feeds. Check out openrss.org that has feeds for a lot of websites. There are even RSS feeds for Mastodon and Lemmy.
- There is no need to go through openrss.org for this.
  
  https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/fediverse.xml?sort=New
  
  There is if you want RSS feeds for things like Lemmy search. And if you want the links in feed items to be associated with a single instance. AFAIK, regular Lemmy feeds dont provide that. But ofc people can use Lemmy feeds if they want.
Are some of these posts, boosts as in reposts? There should be an option to hide a follower's boosts to prevent then from flooding your TL.

You can also hide replies and use key words filters to help keep your TL tidy.

Eta: links
Somehow get them to have a separate feed/account for each writer, as well as each section,

and only subscribe to those subsections of their output YOU care about.

I don't expect ANY newspaper to have the working-brains to understand this concept.

Enforcement/enshittification is the only religion which fits in the heads of "executives", nowadays, right?

Unfortunately, that's the proper answer.

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