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“What are Community Feeds?
“What are Community Feeds?
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“What are Community Feeds? Why has my post been boosted?”
You make a post, add a hashtag, and it’s immediately boosted by one of our Community Feeds - plus you get a notification. What’s going on?
We’re Newsmast and we’re all about knowledge sharing. We’ve built topical Communities, spaces that anyone can dip in and out of to get involved in the things they care about. Communities combine and curate posts from all over the Fediverse into an easy to access single source.
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
That’s why you’ll have seen us boosting your posts. You’ve probably used a hashtag our human curators think suits the conversations in a Community, or our curators have followed you from a Community because you're a leading voice posting regularly on a topic. Your post is then boosted into an organised space that people can see, if they choose to.
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
When you post with a hashtag, your post is pulled into a feed with all the other posts on that hashtag. What we do is keep it safe and on topic by adding extra layers of curation - all done by real people, not AI.
We add carefully researched accounts which post regularly on topic, but usually don’t use any hashtags. Finally, we cut out a lot of irrelevant content which comes through using filters and mutes. -
Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
For every 10 hashtags we might bring together, we’ll often have 50 or more filters in place, and a lot of mutes. Our human moderators constantly update and edit these filters too, to stay on top of the conversations. If you want to join our volunteer moderation team, let us know!
The end result is timely, informative content - including your post.
So why all the boosts and notifications?
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
We wanted to make our communities accessible to everyone in the Fediverse, without the need to use a dedicated app. We’d love to have the ready-made ability to create Community Feeds, but Mastodon and the Fediverse don’t have the built in tools to do this. So, we’ve adapted existing technologies to make things work.
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
We’ve used customised accounts to create the communities, and automated accounts to boost them around the Fediverse so everyone can be a part of it. Unfortunately, notifications are a side effect which we can’t turn off due to the limits of Mastodon’s capability. The good news is that you can turn them off yourself. If you don’t want to follow a feed, and would like to stop seeing notifications: just mute the relevant Feed account. You’ll find them all at newsmast.community.
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
If you have any questions, want to know more, or simply want to remove your content from Community Feeds just let us know by private messaging us or emailing [email protected].
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Please remove me and any of my content from your system.
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Hi, you have now been suspended by the newsmast.community instance so your content will no longer appear there and will be deleted.
Hope that helps!
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WearyBonniereplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
@newsmast
Please remove me too -
Newsmast Foundationreplied to WearyBonnie on last edited by
We've actioned that for you now!
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@newsmast remove me
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Hi, that's been taken care of now. Thanks!
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@[email protected] I see you're getting lots of complaints from people who don't want to be boosted.. May I suggest checking their profile page to for a "#nobot" before boosting?
This is commonly used by people who don't want bot interactions.
Then you can add instructions for that in your profile, and nobody should need to complain (of course, people will always complain
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There are lots of bots on the Fediverse already, and most people who frequently post publicly and use hashtags to increase visibility will experience interactions with bots, but if they don't want that then it's definitely nice if they can choose to disable that by just adding a "#nobot" to their profile -
Hi Matias, thanks for reaching out.
We've looked into this in the past and, unfortunately, unless the user uses #nobot on each of their posts our Feeds would still pick them up.
This is because Feeds work in a very simple way, they pull in content based on hashtags and block content based on hashtags or keywords. They're not a typical 'bot'.
#nobot is in our filters, but Community Feeds do not read a users profile in any way - hence why it's need to be added to each post.
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Newsmast Foundationreplied to Newsmast Foundation on last edited by
Our Community Feeds just organise the posts from across Fedi into a topical timelines based on the hand-curation our team does in each Community.
Thankfully, the amount of users who don't want to be featured is very small compared to the number of people who use the Feeds.
We're always happy to manually remove users from Community Feeds or add relevant new hashtags to our filters.
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@newsmast please remove me from your lists. I don't want you to boost my posts
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Will do! Have a good holiday season
