Mastodon is a platform where you get out what you put in. The lack of recommendations make it hard to onboard. There’s no algorithmic feeds of posts to browse or “who to follow” algorithms pushing you to start following immediately. This is definitely one of the many things that platforms like Bluesky do much better than Mastodon, helping drive their adoption.

I’m not here to critique Mastodon, though. My feed is plenty busy, in fact too busy. Fortunately, Mastodon’s lists make it really easy to get to the content I care about, and provide me with something to look at when I just want to scroll.

In the web interface, lists are accessed on the right of the feed. Clicking on “Lists” there will allow you to manage your lists. You can create lists, delete them, and go into each list to manage its users and settings.

The important feature that you need to know about is the “Hide members in Home” checkbox. Checking this box will cause posts from members of that list not to show up in your home feed. You can use this in a couple of ways.

I have two lists. The first is all the people whose posts I really like. My friends are on this list. People who consistently share stuff I’m interested in are in this list. Good posters are in this list. 99% of the time, if I’m browsing Mastodon, I’m just looking at this list.

The other list is essentially a mute list. It’s a list of accounts that I want to follow for some reason, but they either post too much or regularly post content that I don’t want in my home feed. I rarely if ever look at this one. It’s a very short list.

This setup is great. Mostly I just browse my “quality” list, and stay up to date with it. If I’m looking to scroll and I’m already caught up on the good stuff, I browse my home feed, which stays spam-free since accounts on my 🤫 list are excluded from it.

I like this setup because there’s no infinite feed to scroll. My quality list is trimmed down enough to consistently keep up with and enjoy, and there’s a finite source of more content if I need it. If I want to follow someone, I can do so without worrying about them spamming the quality feed, and if I find I enjoy their posts enough, I can promote them to the quality feed.