Some of the cool things I have discovered Mastodon lets you do.
  • PeterisBacon@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    24 days ago

    Any good things to follow on Mastodon? I’ve tried using it, but between BlueSky and Lemmy, it doesn’t seem to have as many users. No biggie, just asking. Cheers!

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      24 days ago

      Mastodon actually has way more users than Lemmy but you need to follow each person indivdually instead of just following a community, which is probably why it feels more empty

      • NicoleFromToronto@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        24 days ago

        Its why I could never get down with the twitterverse. Seems like the people magazine of the internet. Im not interested in people, im interested in specific subjects and ideas. Maybe im missing something.

        • Darren@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          22 days ago

          You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. So if you want music recommendations you can follow #NowPlaying, (for example) and every time someone uses that tag it’ll appear in your timeline as if you follow that person. It’s nice for follow discovery too, because if the same people keep posting links to tunes you dig, then it’s a fair bet that you’ll have similar interests.

          I’ve not tried it myself, but I guess that in theory, you could follow a bunch of hashtags without ever following an actual account.

    • Xed@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      22 days ago

      I use mastodon to read about what scientists and environmentalists are writing. So not really for social, more like science based post viewing

      • PeterisBacon@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        What are your top recommendations, my friend? I’m big on that, I like the social aspects if sites in a sense, but I prefer having a grouped area for my news.

        While politics are important to stay up to date on, I’m trying to fix mt feeds to have as minimal political news as possible, unless I click on it.

        I’ve been using inoreader, but haven’t quite figured it out either. I’d like to follow scientists and environmentalists like you mentioned, but also artists, designers, small businesses, etc.

        I’m trying to stay up to date in my relevant fields, but also find people to donate my time to. I’ve heard mastodon is great for networking, but to be honest, everyone on lemmy has been bad ass. This is becoming my new hub, does lemmy connect into mastodon fediverse thingy? Lol!

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      24 days ago

      I want to throw in a second good word for hashtags. I follow a tiny handful of people, almost entirely personal friends. But I follow a lot of hashtags. Because it typically is the content that I’m after as opposed to a particular person. If my favorite poster of weather information decides to post something about accounting, I don’t really want to see that. Also following a hashtag gets you a lot more exposure to like-minded people than you would if you were trying to follow them all individually, and you see a lot more posts about things you enjoy.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        I wish mastodon made tags as easy as Tumblr did. I hate that they clutter up the post and that there’s no autocomplete.

    • john_fisherman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      It’s definitely work in progress. But it has also grown a lot, and you will have no issues finding good content there. Hashtags and “people that the people you follow follow” are a good start. Also, at the end of my post you’ll find some seed suggestions. :)

  • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    22 days ago

    Building up a good list of follows on Mastodon is orders of magnitude harder than on Bluesky unfortunately. They need to address this if they want adoption.

    • Darren@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      I dunno. I joined Mastodon back in 2022 and just…followed people.

      They weren’t the same people as on Twitter, but it didn’t really matter in the end. I now follow almost 600 people and never feel like my feed is empty.

      One social media site doesn’t have to be better than another, it just has to be sufficient for your needs.

      • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
        21·
        22 days ago

        That takes a long time. I tried the same on Mastodon and ended up losing interest. I went to bluesky and just followed some starter packs and was up and running in less than an hour with 1000+ follows and a nice feed. Within a few weeks I had more than 700 followers myself.

        • Darren@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          21·
          22 days ago

          See, I don’t understand why anyone would need to immediately follow that many randoms. And I don’t get the need to speedrun social media.

          But hey, it takes all sorts.

          • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            22 days ago

            It’s investment vs payoff. I want to get a feed up and running, then I can tailor it as needed. My feed from using starter packs at Bluesky ended up better than 10+ years at Twitter trying to follow people individually, mostly because I was able to oursource the work of finding people with an interest in certain things to people who have put in the time to do this manually which I don’t have the desire to do.

            It may just be that the Twitter format isn’t a good fit for me, but it worked at Bluesky in a way it didn’t work anywhere else using that style of communication.