Reading and following

The feed

Three tabs:

Tab	Shows
For you	Posts from accounts and tags you follow, plus posts they recommend
Local	Everything published on this instance
Global	Local posts plus what has arrived from the wider fediverse

Pick your default tab in Settings → Reading. There is no engagement-ranked algorithm — ordering is chronological, and “For you” is simply the union of what you chose to follow.

Author diversity on Local and Global

Local and Global thin out any author who would otherwise dominate a page: at most two of their posts in a row, and at most about a fifth of a page (4 of 20) at once. A writer publishing an eight-part series in one sitting still appears — just not eight times before anyone else.

Nothing is deleted and the caps never apply to For you: held-back posts stay on the author’s profile, under their tags, in search, and everywhere else. On Local/Global they either turn up further down the feed or are thinned out of those two tabs entirely. If you want every post in order, the author profile is the complete list.

Recommending

Recommend — the icon next to Like and Comment — reposts a post to your own followers. It federates as a standard ActivityPub Announce, so it interoperates with a boost on Mastodon and similar software in both directions: recommending a post notifies your followers on other instances, and someone boosting your post from Mastodon shows up as a recommendation here.

A recommended post appears in the recommender’s followers’ For you feed — credited to whoever recommended it, sorted by when they recommended it rather than when it was originally published — and on the recommender’s own profile, in a Recommendations tab. It never appears on Local or Global: those two list posts by their own publish time and are unaffected by anyone recommending them.

Recommending cannot widen who may read a post. If the original author requires follower approval, the recommendation only reaches the recommender’s followers who are also approved followers of that author; to everyone else it is not shown at all. The author’s own audience is what decides, not the recommender’s.

Language filtering

Also in Settings → Reading: choose languages to hide, or to show only. Posts carry the language their author selected in the composer.

Following

• Local writers — follow from their profile.
• Remote actors — paste a handle like @someone@mastodon.social into search, or open their profile through a federated post, then follow.

Following a remote actor sends a Follow activity; their server decides whether to accept it. If their account requires approval, the follow stays pending until they act.

Tags

Tags are the discovery mechanism beyond your follow graph.

• Browse a tag at /tags/<tag>.
• Follow a tag and its posts appear in your For you feed — with the same limit as anywhere else: a post by an account requiring follower approval reaches you only if you are an approved follower, whatever tags it carries.
• Manage the whole set in Settings → Followed tags.

Read next

Every article ends with a short list of others worth reading, chosen by how many tags they share with the one you just finished, then by recency. A post that shares no tags with anything — or carries none — falls back to recent posts, so the list is never empty.

Only posts published on this instance appear there. A federated post is a copy of something published elsewhere, so the list leads further into your own instance rather than out to a duplicate.

Search

Search covers posts, local accounts, and tags. Pasting a full remote handle (@user@domain) resolves that actor over WebFinger and shows their profile, even if your instance has never seen them before.

Notifications

/notifications collects likes, recommendations, comments, new followers, and follow requests — local and federated in one list. There is an unread count in the header, and you can mark items or the whole list as read.

Reading lists

Save posts to read later or organise them into named lists. See Lists and read later.

RSS

Every author has a feed:

https://your-domain/@handle/feed.xml

Useful if you would rather read in an RSS client than in the web app. Feeds are never challenged by the AI-scraper shield.

Muting and blocking

• Mute hides someone’s content from you; they are not told.
• Block additionally severs the follow relationship in both directions.

Both work on local and remote accounts, and are managed in Settings → Muted and blocked. Instance-wide blocking of an entire domain is an admin action — see Moderation tools.