Trends

Trends highlight the popular public content on your instance from the last 7 days. We compute them when someone asks for them, then cache the result for 10 minutes. Each trend lists at most 100 items.

What can trend

• Recipes
• Preparations
• Statuses (posts)
• Accounts

Tags don’t trend.

How ranking works

All types share the same time decay. We divide points by (hours + 2)^1.8, where hours is the age of the activity. Newer activity counts more, and points lose value as time passes.

Recipes

A recipe’s score adds up the activity it received during the last 7 days:

• Each like is worth 1 point.
• Each boost is worth 3 points.
• Each public preparation of the recipe is worth 5 points.

We decay each of these by its own age. The age of the recipe itself doesn’t matter, so an older recipe can trend again when it gets new activity.

Preparations and statuses

The points of an item are its likes plus 3 times its boosts. We decay them by the age of the item.

• The item must come from the last 7 days.
• Remote items use the date they arrived on your instance. Their like and boost counts come from their origin server.
• Draft preparations and replies never trend.

Accounts

Only accounts local to your instance can trend. The score of an account is the sum of two parts:

• New followers from the last 7 days, each decayed by its age. Followers from blocked instances don’t count.
• A bonus for authoring trending content. A recipe is worth 3 times as much as a post, and a preparation 2 times. The higher the item ranks, the bigger the bonus.

Language

We filter trends by language. Signed-in users see trends in their own language. Anonymous visitors see trends in the default language of the instance.

What never trends

• Content that isn’t public, and deleted content or accounts.
• Accounts from blocked instances.
• For each person, the accounts they blocked and the accounts that blocked them.

Note: Trends have no manual approval or opt-out today.

Where trends appear

• On the home timeline, when it’s empty. It shows 6 trending recipes.

• On pages, with the trending component:

  {{trending type=recipe count=6}}

  type is one of recipe, preparation, status or account. count goes from 1 to 12, and defaults to 6. Invalid values render nothing.

• In the API, with one endpoint per type: recipes, preparations, statuses and accounts.

Federation

Trends are local to each instance. We don’t share them with other servers over ActivityPub. Remote content can still trend on your instance, based on the likes and boosts we know about. See What is federation? for more.