If you’re the admin of a Mastodon server, there are lots of options for managing the trending posts, hashtags, links and account recommendations in your site’s trends section.
Choose your server’s overall trend settings
First of all, you have to decide whether you want to show trends on your site and whether you want to moderate them in advance:
- Log into your server’s website or web app with your admin account
- Click on ⚙️ Preferences (if you’re on mobile click click ⚙️ then ☰)
- Click Administration
- Click Server Settings
- Click the Discovery tab at the top
- In the Trends section, tick the boxes for what you want and un-tick boxes for what you don’t want
- Click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen
NOTE: It’s very very highly recommended that you do NOT tick the box marked Allow trends without prior review. Allowing unreviewed trends onto your site can cause really awful material to appear there, as trolls may try to use multiple accounts to make offensive material trend. It’s much safer to manually review trends, as the offensive stuff is never visible that way.
Manually reviewing your server’s trends
Here’s how to review the trends on your server (assuming you are using manual reviews):
- Log in through your server’s website or web app with your admin account
- Click on ⚙️ Preferences (if you’re on mobile click click ⚙️ then ☰)
- Click Recommendations & Trends
- Click on the trending section you want to moderate: posts, hashtags, links or follow recommendations
- Tick the items you want to approve or reject, then select the appropriate actions at the top as needed
Note that the post moderation lets you moderate both posts and authors, and the link moderation lets you moderate both the link itself and the website (publisher) it comes from. If you see inappropriate stuff from the same person again and again, you can save time by rejecting the author rather than just specific posts.