While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as […]
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I find it kinda helps after using a tool to import my follows from Twitter to here
I wish I knew that existed before Twitter shut down the API. It doesn’t work anymore.
You still can. I used a tool called fedifinder to transfer my follows a few days ago.