So, micro.blog's "Discover" feed... 50 posts. 2 women. 2 reviews of this month's coffee subscription. At least 9 users with more than one post in the Discover feed (all dudes). Probably about a third of posts are travel/street/landscape photos. Many posts from well-known users who have been highly visible on the site for years. This is a hand-curated feed, and one of the only mechanisms to "discover" new people to follow.
@adam since you’ve said you don’t know, I’ll explain exactly how the emoji lists work:
Manton wanted a way to filter posts topically that did not need curation. He thought hashtags created too much surface for abuse in terms of post content, but also brigading and the kind of virality that concerns him and feels like it can’t be moderated. So he came up with an idea called “tagmoji” where basically rather than using hashtags, you could include an emoji in your post. And he built feeds and labeled them for a number of emoji, some of which were added on community request, as a mechanism for discovery that didn’t rely on the hand curation of Discover (and also didn’t require that people agree on things like category metadata on their blogs).
Does this work? Meh, I don’t care for it that much. But I also use Mastodon/Threads/Bluesky and blogs themselves for finding new accounts largely and haven’t been looking for a way to bootstrap a topical community.