In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
Mastodon is cool, and I’d use it more if I could get used to the format. The Lemmy/Reddit forum style is my preference.
I just don’t understand how people find accounts they like to follow.
just follow hashtags you like, that way you’ll see people who post about interesting stuff.
That’s the main reason why I’m half and half on mastodon (besides the terrible user search and onboarding). I believe the way hashtags are implemented in microblogging services is so inorganic, and I prefer having a little help finding cool posts and people through some kinda filter. Bluesky has been a better experience in those aspects for me so far.
They do have a “for you” on the Mastodon app where they recommend people you might like BUT it’s hard to find and they don’t have the option to follow general hashtags like, “sportsnews” or something like that. Tusky is FOSS and does have the general hashtag follow but no “for you” section. Early stages and all.
I started by just following a bunch of hashtags and my feed was already quite interesting. Over the next few days I started following a few people who seemed to consistently post content that I found interesting.
A big part of it is just choosing the right instance. If you have any niche hobbies or interests, try to find an instance catering to that. My first mastodon account was on mastodon.social and I really didn’t like the experience, since most posts seemed to be about American politics and IT.
But then I found an instance catering to heavy metal fans, and the experience has been much better. When you find a good instance, you can find interesting accounts to follow just by visiting the local timeline. Then, as other said, there are hashtags. And sometimes, you can open the federated timeline too, and just look randomly.
I really like that aspect of Mastodon because it feels like the old old Internet where you found interesting stuff mainly accidentally and by searching for things you’re into.
Now that I’m mentioning the very old internet, I’m reminded of StumbleUpon and I wonder if some implementation of that would work on the Fediverse for finding communities and accounts. Basically you’d tell the system your interests and then it would give you random stuff based on that.
First, it’s important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you’re set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they’d be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.
It’s more work since you’re building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it’s overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.
I have the same issue on Lemmy, but at least there’s All. I can’t figure out where “All” is on Mastodon.
The equivalent to All would be the federated timeline, some apps don’t show it though, and some may call it something else.
I guess the official “Mastodon” app doesn’t show it, then. I’ll look at the other options.
If you’re on Android, I’m a big fan of Moshidon!
I prefer pull vs push media. Less intrusive. I have a feeling lemmy users may also like RSS feeds for the control it provides. I know in mastodon you decide who to follow, but the whole culture to encourage re-blogging means a lot of potential unwanted crap in our feeds.
A fine brief on mastodon but it hardly “rewound” anything.
The fedi had been around long before mastodon and even facebook.
are they going to stop censoring people for saying offensive things? That would be good.
