Eh, that comes down to how you choose to use the platform.
Speaking for myself, early on I used the local and federated feeds to find interesting people to follow, but once my followed list was built up, I found I rarely spent time in those feeds.
Personally, I'd say if folks are using Mastodon in the way you're describing, they'd be better off using Lemmy or kbin, which are centered around communities containing topics, as then you can just follow those communities rather than following individual people.
It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow.
I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.
Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.
I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.
I don't really know who to follow on Mastodon. Many of the people that led me to use Twitter have not moved, and are still tweeting away. A couple have moved, but its really not a good experience searching for someone on Mastodon and coming up with nothing.
Lemmy on the other hand I'm finding to be great, because it already has small communities I can join and participate in.
The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me:
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
I use mastodon and like it. Other than HN (which I also count as a "social platform"), it's the only social platform I use. It is also decentralized. However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are on the mastodon instance I'm on. I've actually made efforts to branch out, but I find it impossible. The network effect means that the whole of the external feed is full of stuff I'm completely uninterested in and there are no tools (that I know of) to whittle it down. For me this is a significant hurdle that stands in the way of them realizing their goals.
Lemmy has the concept of "communities" - subreddits, basically. On Mastodon, you can follow a Lemmy user and see their posts+comments exactly as you'd expect. And you can follow a community too! To Mastodon's point of view, the community is a single user that "boosts" (re-tweets) every post and every comment made within. So following a moderately active community from Mastodon will absolutely flood your feed with 100% of the community's user activity.
Meanwhile, Lemmy doesn't do direct messages or use hashtags as a first-class feature. So if a Mastodon user tries to DM a Lemmy user, or a Lemmy user wants to follow a hashtag, they're out of luck.
And again, there are other Fediverse apps with even different models than these. Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab are going to adapt ActivityPub to all federate with each other - this is a huge win, of course - but would we expect someone to make or review a pull request from their BookWyrm account?
It's not about the platform, but the people. Mastodon is nice for some of the techy stuff I'm interested in. But it's useless for other things I used to follow on Twitter: hyper-local news and weather, sports banter, and other researchers in my field.
Honestly, without a way to search content and not just people/hashtags, there isn't an organic way for me to discover people talking about what I'm interested in, so Mastodon just isn't useful out of the gate. It relies on finding a niche community you're interested in out of the gate, and if I wanted to go that route I'd just use Reddit.
I am curious what Twitter features you are missing in Mastodon? The only thing I can think of that I feel like many people expect is some kind if "curated" recommendations system (e.g. I only want to see content that is relevant to me). This, of course, is a double-edged sword at best (who gets to decide what content is recommended? What are their goals/motivations?). Personally, I have not had any issues finding interesting folks to follow on Mastodon. Even though I started years ago on a completely fresh instance, I found some lists of recommended follows and started by following the ones who seemed interesting. The networking effect took it from there since following/interacting with those initial accounts surfaced more similar accounts to my server which I also chose to follow. Now my feed is full of cool stuff from the hundreds of accounts that I follow. Looking at the federated feed gives me an even more broad look at lots of things happening the the general fedi!
If you just want a feed of stuff where you choose who to subscribe to, where you can like and comment, no ads, and that's about it... that's Mastodon. If you want more topic-organized threads, that's Lemmy. There's not many people on the fediverse relative to mainstream social media, but there's enough for it have the Craigslist/usenet/BBS feeling.
The key to Mastodon is to follow hashtags so you instantly get any content relevant to your interests. I'm only following a few people because most people who have a similar interest to me will also post stuff not related to our common interest. By following hashtags, I get every post I want to see and none of the noise.
Do you follow people on Reddit or do you follow communities?
I make no claims of whether one model is superior to another; only an observation that on Mastodon, one model will yield better results than the other if what you seek is engagement.
Mastodon -- at least for now -- is topic-oriented rather than creator-oriented.
My issue with Mastodon is that it imitates Twitter a little too well. I keep finding people to block when looking for people to follow. The local and federated feeds are infested with spammers, self-righteous ideologues of all kinds, 4chan rejects, and bots. It just isn't worth the effort.
As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.
Discoverability, basically. You can get a lot of incredibly good information from Twitter with a very carefully curated follow list. You can get that from Mastodon as well, but you're going to have a much harder time finding the same people in a fully decentralized world. I think I'd rather that existence, which I'm noticing as I wind up in more niche Facebook groups and Discord servers than on broader platforms like Instagram or Twitter, but it's not zero value per se.
The neat thing about federated social media is you don't have to federate with tankies even if you use their software. kbin appears to have some trouble working with Mastodon. My experience so far is boosts and replies on Mastodon are the #1 driver of new signups to the Lemmy instance I'm on, so it matters.
Speaking for myself, early on I used the local and federated feeds to find interesting people to follow, but once my followed list was built up, I found I rarely spent time in those feeds.
Personally, I'd say if folks are using Mastodon in the way you're describing, they'd be better off using Lemmy or kbin, which are centered around communities containing topics, as then you can just follow those communities rather than following individual people.
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