There are only four ways that posts can appear in your main Mastodon timeline:

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

There are only four ways that posts can appear in your main Mastodon timeline:

- You follow the account that made the post
- You follow an account that shared the post
- You follow a hashtag that is included in the post
- You follow a group that shared the post

If you see a post in your main timeline that doesn't seem to fit into any of these categories, this guide might help you find out what is going on:

️ https://fedi.tips/why-is-a-post-appearing-in-my-mastodon-timeline-i-dont-understand-how-it-got-there

#FediTips #Mastodon #HomeTimeline

[tmcfarlane@toot.community]

@FediTips I feel like "why am I seeing this" needs to be baked into the web/app experience. If someone has thrown 20 tags on a post, finding the one it came from can be annoying (I mean, I'm muting them anyway, but still, some hash tags hit a threshold where they get interesting to spammers).

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@FediTips

wait, "follow a group"? I must have missed something here. What are groups? How are they created/managed?

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@gumnos

Here you go https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@FediTips

If I'm reading that correctly, a "group" is more like an account at particular servers (like fedigroups) that just re-shares out things tagged with the group-account by account-followers; as opposed to being an "every Mastodon instance has Group functionality" that I'd somehow missed.

Would that be an accurate description?

[laukidh@infosec.exchange]

@FediTips I’ve seen where a post has hashtags I can’t see, and that’s why it was in my feed

[5cifigirl@starbase80.wtf]

@gumnos @FediTips

I participate in a few of those, and that is basically it, yes.

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@5ciFiGirl

Helpful to have your first-hand experience. The original @FediTips phrasing made it sound like a full-fledged feature available in every Mastodon instance rather than "a custom behavior implemented by a couple particular instances."

Still useful in its own right, but not quite as broadly applicable as I'd hoped.

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@gumnos

It's a discussion group similar to email discussion groups that used to exist in the 1990s/2000s. Members send posts to the group, the group relays it to the rest of the group's followers.

If you're following/posting then it is available on every server.

If you're creating/managing then it does indeed require signing up on a specific server.