I made a bunch of Mastodon search tools that are available free and free of ads at https://mastogizmos.com/ . (You can use the site on your phone but it works better on desktop.)

If you're looking for people to follow or interact with I recommend Hashtag Harvest, which will give you results for a hashtag search but also show you related hashtags and users associated with those hashtags. There's also Wikipedia-Mastodon Thing, which keyword-searches Wikipedia for articles which have associated Mastodon accounts or instances.

(I only started learning JavaScript a couple of years ago and I made MastoGizmos about a year ago, so you don't need to tell me it's goofy looking. I'm going to revamp.)

Also, I found that when I was wandering around the web I would see Mastodon people I wanted to follow. I made a little bookmarklet for ease of following-while-browsing. It's available here: https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/Mastodon-Follow-Bookmarklet .

Hope this helps. I'm researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host ; if you have an intro post tag me and I'll give it a bounce.

Hi, ResearchBuzz wrangler here. Thanks for the mention. ResearchBuzz.me is for aggregating news items twice a day along with search articles and resource announcements. If you want thoroughly-tagged resources delivered one at a time, you want ResearchBuzz Firehose ( https://rbfirehose.com/ ). I've written an article on how to set up keyword-based RSS feeds for Firehose to make your monitoring as efficient as possible ( https://researchbuzz.me/2015/06/23/introducing-the-researchb... ).

Both ResearchBuzz and RB Firehose are free and free of ads.

Thank you again for your interest.

I've had your site bookmarked forever (10 years maybe?). I admire your perseverence. You took on the work of tracking things like 'Tupelo, MS public library has posted a collection of farm equipment photographs from 1922-1935' and so forth without fail for years.

Glad I could help.

The Stract open source search engine has a setting to mark results with probable ads or paywalls: https://stract.com/settings

The API is currently free and also has that feature.

I've been working on tools to make Google search better for a couple of years now and have gathered 18 of them into a site called SearchTweaks: https://searchtweaks.com/ . The site is completely free (no cost, no ads, no tracking.) You might find No Shop Sherlock useful, or one of the query builders.

Hey,thanks very much. I was wondering where all that traffic was coming from.

For those of you who are more interested in very specific information, there's also ResearchBuzz Firehose, which indexes individual items so you can do tag- and query-monitoring without trouble. Here's an article on how to make the most of it: https://researchbuzz.me/2015/06/23/introducing-the-researchb...

It's wonderful to see people getting into RSS and news feeds again. I have a site called RSSGizmos.com with a number of tools for making the most of RSS, including a keyword-based RSS feed generator and a tool to make RSS feeds using Bing News' loc: syntax.

Everything's free and there are no ads.

Thank you again, it was so kind of you to mention my site.

Hahaha. No probs Tara. I've been a long term reader of your site for probably a decade or so, and i've found loads of useful/ interesting stuff over the years because of it. I honestly don't know how you keep up with all the things you post about (do you ever sleep:-). Hope you and the family are well and keep up the good work;-) If any HN readers are into RSS, monitoring topics/keywords and finding obscure stuff online I recommend checking out her tools/guides. She has some pretty creative stuff on there which are usually free to use/implement.