Mastodon is a free and open source alternative to Twitter, with an active online development community dedicated to providing alternatives to top-down, censorable, and opaque social media platforms.

One suggestion made by the community was the ability to view trending topics. I've drawn up my ideas for how such a feature might look.

The structure of the sketch is as follows: On the [currently empty] search page, list the top trends within each of the timelines; Home, Local, and Federated. Each trend row contains the trend text, the number of posts within a determined time range (ex. 1 hour), and a sparkline of activity in that time range

Twitter Comparison

Not only does this duplicate Twitter's existing "trending" functionality, but I'd argue this is a large improvement over twitter. Improvements include improved information density, sparklines to indicate recent patterns, and the notion that Mastodon can't suppress hashtags like Twitter has been suspected of doing in the past.

I also added my annoying opinions (in red) about why Twitter's approach sucks. I don't like Moments, that's just an opinion of mine. Previews take away screen space from being able to list more trending topics. Lastly, Ads need to be abolished. No longer shall our online attention be sold to the profiteers of industry.