Feedback is extremely welcome. This is a loving document, it can only be honed and get better with loving input from other users. What are your best tips for #creators?
@carlbrown Oooh, yes, thanks for the tip! I do follow hashtags too, i.e. #mythology, but I completely spaced out on adding it to the article! I will edit it. Any hashtags you find useful beyond the ones you already mentioned? 💖
@AimeeMaroux #AmWriting is particularly good for finding other writers, as is #Bookstodon and #WritersCoffeeClub. I'm in a different niche, so I follow a bunch of scifi and space-related hashtags. I follow tags I see in posts on a whim. I've built up quite a collection over time of tags that are relevant to my interests and the potential audience for my book (assuming I ever finish it 😂). #MastodonMigration#FediTips#NewHere#WritersofMastodon
@thelusciouslibra Thanks Kathrine, I saw now. Hm. I'm gonna reach out to the admin and ask if I rather shouldn't rec the instance to creators if ads are against the server policy. It might be self-promotion is not considered the same as ads but the wording makes it seem like sharing external links is frowned upon.
Thanks again for bringing this to my attention.
@AimeeMaroux This looks awesome! Well done & thanks for the backlinks. Things change rapidly and an update was needed! I can send you “free” links if you prefer to use them.
@qblueheart
You're very welcome! I had to go back and edit the article a couple of times already, things are moving fast. Next edit I'll have to make is about Tumblr axing the activity pub integration plans and possibly Tumblr itself...
What do you mean when you say "free links"? Not on Medium?
@AimeeMaroux You don't happen to have a guide on how to convince fellow creatives to come over from the old site do you? All of the old numismatic community I used to have great interaction with there... Just won't move... I think because the others there haven't moved (clearly I do not have enough pulling power to prompt them to action). It is disheartening although a tiny new community is very slowly starting here
@CoinOfNote Sadly, I don't. I haven't been very successful with bringing people over, unfortunately. Not even with people who should know better than to trust a corporate platform because they are NSFW creators. Most have flocked to BlueSky which... I honestly don't get it. There are no features, I can't even make lists of people I am interested in, so I keep missing my friends' posts.
I think the best we can do is help make a great first impression for those who DO give Mastodon a try 😐
@AimeeMaroux At least the poor search is slowly starting to improve. Hopefully that will help both with new users and with those of us already here to connect.
@CoinOfNote I feel like the search is pretty good already. And there were some cool features on the roadmap. What I personally miss the most right now are quote toots and a way to see hashtags across all instances.
@taoish@CoinOfNote I cannot manually QT if I want to show off an artist's work without reposting their art.
Also I never said I don't get results from other instances?
But my topic is rather niche and it would be nice to see ALL results for a hashtag. Especially for events happening in real time like Eurovision etc. For small instances, such a service would be super helpful.
My personal use case aside: it is not helpful if someone says "I wish feature Y would exist here" to reply...
@taoish@CoinOfNote ...with an unhelpful comment that essentially boils down to "well, I don't have any issues".
Sorry, but this is exactly the kind of behaviour why people leave Mastodon.
Listen to new people instead of insisting that everything is perfect as it is.
@AimeeMaroux@CoinOfNote
Wow, what a harsh response. Allow me to expand:
"Do you mind saying more about what is going wrong? I seem to get hashtag results from other servers, but now I am concerned that I'm missing a lot of results bc obviously I can't know what I'm not seeing. Do you get zero results ever from other servers? Or do you get some but know that others are missing? I'm trying to understand what the issue might be (for both of our sakes)."
@taoish@CoinOfNote I'm sorry, I thoroughly misread your message ❤️
On mastodon.social, I rarely get zero results but when I was on smaller instances it was a much bigger issue. I'm co-hosting the MythologyMonday hashtag on thefolklore.cafe and when we first started out, there were quite a few posts that didn't show up (but did show up when I searched from my personal account on mastodon.social).
Mastodon instances only get search results of instances they know, so a 3rd party crawler would be 👍
@AimeeMaroux@CoinOfNote I apologize for not being more clear (and gracious). I actually thought about adding softening language but I was in a rush. Sorry!
@AimeeMaroux@taoish 🤚🤚🤚to the 3rd party crawler! Especially since the whole POINT of search, in anything, is "find me something I didn't already know" (ok, I search my email and my computer for stuff I did know but can't remember where it is, but ASIDE from that)
@taoish@AimeeMaroux The way search works on Mastodon is that I will results from Historians.social (the server I'm on) & the others that this one knows about, the servers of people I follow & those on instances others on my server follow, The smaller server you are on, exponentially the fewer servers it knows about. Any server can only find out about what it already knows about, unless YOU find something yourself through a friend's friend and follow them. At least, I think that's how it works?
@CoinOfNote@AimeeMaroux
Interesting, thank you. So it sounds like there isn't much an individual user can do except to make sure that you are on a bigger server?
@taoish@CoinOfNote You can search other instances, I think, so you could look up the hashtag on a bigger instance. Or a niche instance if it fits the search well. But the way federation works the only thing an individual user can do is following lots of people from lots of different servers.
@AimeeMaroux@CoinOfNote Wow, what a confusing yet interesting fact! So if I just follow people on different servers, I accidentally get wide coverage on my hashtag searches!? Never would have guessed that in a thousand years.
@CoinOfNote I'm not sure why this doesn't exist as a third party service because to my very limited technical understanding it would be possible. But there were changes to API access that killed the trending hashtags service so maybe that's why there is none at the moment.
Personally I think its the confusion. The fediverse is huge and like a maze for a creator. I am on the historian instance, but if I make something artsy or NSFW there is no guarantee it finds the people who want to see it opposed to somewhere else where its guaranteed to be found.
@AimeeMaroux I have another question - it looks like it's easy to start a group. Once a group is set up, does the owner/initiator have to go in and manually boost the posts? I've been running google searches and can't find much about it. So far only three authors (that I'm aware of) have migrated to Mastodon from our marketing group, but I think it would help us connect and boost each other if we have our own group here. Which we did on Twitter, an @ as well as a hashtag. And thanks!
@AdrianaKraftbooks No, there isn't really a group owner at the a.gup.pe groups, it's essentially a bot that automatically boosts every toot it is tagged in to its followers. So you have no control over who joins the group.
This is different with chirp.social groups but I don't have as much experience with them. But you need to make an account to create a chirp group and you can kick users from following your chirp group.
@AimeeMaroux thank you Aimee, very helpful. One thing that is a halfway house on muting or unfollowing is turning off someone’s boosts. This can also stop one tooter filling your timeline.
@AimeeMaroux Two things - I shared the link to your post on a romance/fiction marketing group I'm part of with about 550 members. I'm getting lots of response, hope peeps will come check out Mastodon.
Thing two: what exactly happens when I tag a group in a post? I thought my post would then go to other peeps who follow the group (which I've also followed), not sure, or to the group feed...
@AdrianaKraftbooks When you tag a group, the group automatically boosts the post to all its followers. So it shows up in the feed of everyone following the group and it should also appear in the group's timeline.
@AimeeMaroux the migration has been easy for me as the useful and likeable Twitter was gone since 2012 or 2015 maybe? But while I am here since many years, it’s only a couple of months that I started to get some echoes !
@nautilebleu I only joined Twitter in 2018 but it still was incredibly valuable to me. It had become much less so even before Musk bought it, never showing me what my fellow erotica writers were doing and I got a lot less engagement on my tweets.
@AimeeMaroux yes in the last months I use it (during the Covid), I often have only one only like. I thought it was because I suck at socialising as I am interested by sharing my content but not much spending tons of time creating relations with other people. In a certain way, I am happy to learn that it was not just me !
@nautilebleu I mean, on Twitter and on Mastodon both it helps to interact with people to be seen. But I've heard of the drop in engagement from other NSFW writers too, it's not just you or me.
@jrdepriest Thank you, J.R. 🥰
It's a resource you can come back to every once in a while, I think. I'm sure I will have to update the groups and hashtags over time 😅
@AimeeMaroux np. Just trying to help since you set off my proofreading instincts.
You also seem to be missing a link to a guide in the "Fill out the extra fields" section.
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