Two great things you can do to make the fediverse more diverse and interesting:

1) USE LOTS OF HASHTAGS. It's not spammy! It helps people find stuff they're interested in, since the search is intentionally limited to tags to prevent abuse.

2) BOOST THE GOOD STUFF. It gets it into new federated timelines, which is vital for smaller instances with fewer connections. It also helps with hashtag searches, since they only bring up toots known to your instance via follows and boosts.

#mastodon #meta

@cassolotl I thought boosts don't appear in federated and local timelines, only in home timelines of your followers?

@luka They appear in federated timelines, but not local timelines. :)

@cassolotl are you 100% sure? i must be missing something. :(

because i checked on 4 mastodon instances where i have accounts and none of the federated timelines have any boosts.

boosts are shown in Home timeline, lists and notifications. but not on local or federated timelines.

@luka They wouldn't *look* like boosts, they don't have that whole double-avatar thing going on in the federated timeline. They just appear as if someone on your instance was following them.

@luka Sometimes I find a toot from another instance (like from their public timeline on /about or a hashtag page), and I'm like hey that's good. So I copy the toot's URL, go back to my web UI where I've got the federated timeline open, paste the toot URL into the search box, press enter - and it's now known to my instance, so it appears in the federated timeline right at the top.

@luka Every recent, public, original (non-reply) toot that becomes known to your instance makes it into the federated timeline - and that includes toots that are boosted or entered into the search box.

Hold on I think I have a diagram that might help...