I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I’m part of on twitter. Ever since musk’s takeover, I’ve been using twitter less and less.
One of Mastodon’s upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don’t suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance’s users, which won’t cover interesting things from other instances (unless they’re specifically boosted).
Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.
I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can’t stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.
It’s fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That’s all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.
Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don’t follow, on the topics you have an interest in.
Same here. I love how fluid Mastodon’s app is, especially compared to Lemmy’s. But I scroll for a bit and there’s nothing that interests me on my timeline.
No one is going to feed you content. It’s a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.
But you gotta bootstrap it. There’s a lot of interesting people and content in it.
There’s a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.
There’s hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.
I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it’s so worth it and rewarding. So, don’t quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It’s a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.
And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.
So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.
Seriously, follow hashtags! If friends start to join boost their early posts so other people can find them too. You take the place of the algorithm on Mastodon, so you’re ultimately responsible for curating your experience.
Though I will say, don’t use the offical app. It lacks a federated timeline still, which is weird. If you like that UI though, Moshidon is a fork that adds some customization and the federated timeline, which is a neat way to see what’s goin on.
Hit “Explore” and follow hash tags to grow your list of accounts to follow. It really helps a lot! Mine used to be like 2 minutes of scrolling and I’m done for the day. Now it’s…um…I should get back to work.
I mean, isn’t that a good thing? You shouldn’t be doom scrolling anyways
Also, that’s a temporary measure. As more people migrate, there will be more content.
there is still some work needed to be done on sync for lemmy meanwhile, you can try connect or liftoff for Lemmy
Same. It feels like Mastodon isn’t anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users
Same. It feels like Mastodon isn’t anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users necessary for it to take off.
Despite mastadon being more active, it seems less lively. I guess it’s because I preferred Reddit over Twitter in the first place.
Longer form content is always more fun for me. Structured topics and conversations are way better to exchange ideas and shitposts.
Mastodon seems to become yet another rage cage like twitter, first thing I saw when I opened it yesterday was people bitching about politics, that’s a BIG nope for me
You must’ve joined the wrong server then, because mine isn’t like that. And you can just filter out and follow the things you want as well. There’s no algorithms to automatically feed you stuff.
I didn’t even sign up, I just wanted to see what it was all about, whining about politics and general madness, just like twitter, not for me, so I didn’t end up signing
Well, you had to open some Mastodon server in your browser. And there will be differences between them, just like what’s on the front page of lemmy.world is different from the frontpage of lemmy.ml
Like all social media, you have to curate it. I follow hashtags for cats, books, writing, fandoms, etc. The rage is minimum then because my homepage doesn’t have politics or news. I actually do follow a couple of news sources, but their stuff is surrounded by an ocean of fun things so it’s not nearly as bad.
Maybe this is just how all “Scream into the void” platforms inevitably ends up.
It is extremely political, I’ve had a hard time filtering it all out. Every account posting memes tends to feel like they have a huge political chip on their shoulder. Kinda exhausting. I’ve had trouble finding the content that I used Twitter for.
I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it’s hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don’t like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it’s the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project
Jack Dorsey is the reason why some of these perennially online personalities moved to Bluesky. The AT protocol maybe decentralized but there’s no unofficial instances of it yet (afaik).
I’m on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.
Word. Mastodon is fabulous. There’s not very many people, but I haven’t encountered many assholes. And does it ever run smooth!
I wouldn’t consider another VC money backed app/service anymore no matter how good the tech might be. I hope we all remember the hard lessons from the fiascos in the recent months.
This brings up my main questions with mastodon and lemmy… who is going to pay the server costs at scale?
It would be nice if those mechanisms began sooner than later.
I’m tossing $10 to both a month. Many of us are doing that to avoid being the product.
That’s honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta’s Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it’s on the record that they’ve been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.
I noticed it looked slightly different, but I haven’t noticed much difference
I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I’m part of on twitter. Ever since musk’s takeover, I’ve been using twitter less and less.
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I’ll have to give it another try - Megalodon is my current favourite
I use it. So far I like it.
