Trends

One of the key features of Mastodon is that there's no sophisticated algorithm to drive more traffic to the site or influence your thinking. All posts are displayed in a traditional chronological timeline with the newest posts or boosts made by people or hashtags you follow displayed at the top of the page.

Mastodon does offer trending hashtags, posts, and links features on the Explore page that are based solely on observed activity within vmst.io and other federated servers.

Trends are calculated based on a simple combination of boosts (reposts) and favorites, with a decaying score to make sure that older content cannot trend forever based on additional interactions.

Moderation

Generally speaking, trending topics are only moderated if they are deemed inappropriate for the context of our server.

• Hashtags largely trend on their own without moderator intervention.
• Links will largely trend automatically if they're from reputable news sources; however, some publishers are specifically prohibited from trending.
• Some posts will trend automatically if they're from known figures with a history of appropriate content.