As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?
I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…
There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.
Thank you, that looks like a great place to start!
It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.
It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.
You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It’s the first accounts to follow then you will find others.
It’s not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it’s not Twitter and so it works differently.
I don’t think they call it TOOTS anymore.
I’m a grandpa of mastodon.
Toots despite the proximity with tweet is good for the community aspect.
So… boosting publishes?
Doesn’t seem right.
That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.
What I did in the very beginning:
don’t worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a “community in itself”.
Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.
Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.
Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.
Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.
Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.
(Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won’t be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.
Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.
When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it’s the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.
What is the Mastodon directory?
I mean the list of servers on Mastodon’s main site. I added the link to the original post.
Thanks!
I wrote since stuff to help new Mastodon users: https://babylon4.com/mastodon
I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:
Nowadays I would add this step:
Find tags that you like; follow the tags.
Eventually you’ll find people posting in those tags that you end up liking; follow them.
And repeat. =)
I mainly used it for news till the rate limiting but i just followed news sources and have since found users to follow.
I joined via fosstodon.org much better recommendations
I used a site that let’s you follow the same accounts on Masto as you did on Twitter.