Alright! So one fine day I decided to check the Fediverse out and eventually joined mastodon. I’ve downloaded the Megalodon app on my phone and everything. And now I’m at a loss on what to do with it. In reality, how do you use Mastodon? I’ve never used Twitter before, so I’m completely new to this form of social media. All I saw were people talking about strange topics only they understood with no engagement whatsoever, and the other posts were straight up anime furry porn left and right. I only found out about Lemmy today. and it’s even amazing than I expected. I’d love to hear how you use the Fediverse platforms and any tips you have.
Ironically Ive known about fedi for years and years, but only with lemmy am i now properly active in it. I wouldnt bother with masto, its not anywhere as fun or worth it
Yeah, that’s not fair to say it’s not worth it. Different strokes for different folks. With no algorithm it takes some effort to curate your feed, but because it doesn’t appeal to you doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.
It’s all the same information on the fediverse, and we all get to choose how we want to interact with it.
It’s subjective to each of us, I wasn’t a fan of Twitter, but Masto just gels well with me.
Twitter is interesting when you follow people that are central to something, who keep their feeds clean. For example, someone posting about their three different hobbies and their job and family is very annoying if you are only interested in one of that.
Twitter alleviates that a bit by promoting posts that they classify as “interesting”, which I think are those that get a lot of interaction. Maybe also other things. This way, you can follow a heap of people but you will see updates from the more interesting ones first.
Mastodon on the other hand just gives you a raw stream. Which is pretty boring because people tend to talk about all kinds of topics, and only few actually curate their content. And even if you follow just the curated content, it is very easy to miss some interesting stuff if you happen to not read every single post in your timeline.
Mastodon alleviates that by boosting, which puts a pushes a post on top of your timeline again. But then you only see it if you are looking at the timeline while someone is boosting. There is also some sort of a trending page being developed on there, but it is only for posts that get boosted at least five times or so, and it is not necessarily related to your interests. A bit like Reddits “all” community.
Reddit and Lemmy seem to combine the best of both worlds. Posts are sorted into communities that revolve around certain topics. So you can choose which topic to follow. And you never need to weigh following a person because they post about interesting thing A, but also boring thing B. You can choose to share only your common interests with that person by participating in the same community. Much like friendships work in real life.
On top of that, Reddit and Lemmy employ a voting mechanism to present the topics that appear most interesting to most users first. This is great, because even within a topical community, there are various subtopics to discuss, and not all are most relevant all the time. Also, naturally people say sometimes more interesting things, and sometimes less interesting things. And sometimes people spend more effort on a post and sometimes less. All totally natural things, but things that make participating into a larger community hard. Voting alleviates that, because people don’t need to think if what they post is interesting to the community at the moment, but the community decides that democratically.
Reddit and Lemmy also allow following users (not sure if Lemmy already does), so one can still follow that one cool rock star or that one CEO or that one journalist that posts only interesting things about various topics.
I don’t think Lemmy allows following users, but kbin does as well as interacts with Calckey/Mastodon. This allows you to follow topics their from the comfort of kbin (and if they enabled it, Lemmy too).
The trick with Mastodon/Calckey is to follow hashtags, not people in the case you’re talking about. While not important here, it’s the main way of finding other posts of interest there. So you can follow #topic and anytime someone posts about it, it’ll appear in your timeline.
You are correct about the timing, if you’re not on regularly you will miss posts. But the nice thing about the fediverse is the content is all the same, you just decide how you feel like experiencing it.
I struggle a little with Mastodon. The accounts I follow are all either people I follow on other social networks that just happen to mention that they have a mastodon account or accounts that are centered around a given topic that I searched for, such as AI art. Mastodon has a handy “verified” feature whereby you can prove that you are a representative of a website by adding a code snippet, but not everyone does. In short, it’s getting there but I can’t find people that I want to follow as easily as on old Twitter.
Lemmy is proving more intuitive to me so far, although part of that is because I’ve always been more of a Reddit person than a Twitter person. Once you get used to looking for communities, it’s easy to find any that may exist for a topic that you want. I’ve got multiple communities around the same topic from different instances, such as technology, but it’ll be easy to watch them over time and prune any that seem redundant or that may fall apart.
Try following tags in Mastodon to get what you’re looking for. It takes a bit more work than Twitter since there’s no algorithm, so you have to curate your feed the way you want it.
That said, I do have a Calckey and kbin account and go between them because I like a little compartmentalization.
Reddit/Lemmy are link aggregators with a forum-like comment and post structure. Mastodon/Twitter are microblogging platforms. You go to someone’s blog to read their thoughts, in the context of themselves, and everyone choosing to follow would like to keep up to date with their going ons/niche interests. You go to a forum to read discussions, on a specific topic, in a (somewhat) more organized fashion, and will recognize the regulars in regards to their discussion contribution.
On Mastodon/Twitter, you follow people. On Reddit/Lemmy, you follow topics. You can follow hashtags on mastodon, and you can follow people on reddit, but in general, the philosophy of what you would do with these platforms is different. These both can work together on the fediverse, and in general, social media, because a post on either isn’t much more than text and images with some categorical tags/filters. The technical specifications aren’t that much different, so they can be applied in the same space.
However, I feel like lemmy and mastodon aren’t going to see as much interaction with each other for this reason. It’s possible, people have already been demonstrating it, but I’ve tried browsing a community from mastodon and it’s just not inductive to how that UI/strategy displays long form comment chains. I mean mastodon itself doesn’t even create a visual indicator of comment chains. This isn’t exactly a terrible downside, I do like mastodon and used twitter a lot, but I go to lemmy and mastodon for different reasons, as they were created for different purposes!
