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.
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.
Same as really old old Twitter.
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.
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.
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Yes! your fedi client will spit out a text file (.csv format I think) of accounts you follow, or of accounts following you and I forget how many other kinds of information (like block or mute lists, etc). You can share that with others, or if you decide to migrate to a different instance, you can use that in your new account to automate following of everyone you followed in your old account.
Yep
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How did you find a good instance?
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 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.
List of Journalists etc
The low-hanging fruit is sometimes checking out posters that show up in your feed because someone you do follow boosted their post. This sort of amounts to having the people you follow nominate people for you to also follow.
(fwiw, boosting a post just shares it to your followers, liking it just notifies the poster that you liked it)