Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I’m not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I’m supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I’m one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
"Searching for a subject matter that interests you" in Mastodon/PixelFed is all about hashtags. If you're interested in science fiction, try #scifi. You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests (for example a dedicated scifi instance, like what startrek.website is for Lemmy), or a general purpose one (mastodon.social) where you can get a better overview. If you find an instance related to your interests later on, consider moving there.
As you search hashtags, you'll find interesting people. Follow them. You'll see some interesting posts. Boost them. Adding a star to a post serves no practical function, but it'll make the poster happy anyway (it's the same as upvotes here).
Mastodon is based a lot around boosts - if you see someone boosting a lot of content of the type you're interested in seeing, make sure to follow them and your feed will be populated by content curated by humans, not algorithms.
As long as everybody are federated - but they are not. The bigger instances tend to be federated with everyone, but the smaller/more specialized ones might not yet have federated with each other. Of course you can still follow people from anywhere (as long as they're not actively _de_federated), but searching for hashtags might unfortunately be less powerful for discovery from a smaller server. If you're on a smaller instance not specific to your interests, you might do particularly well to start out finding accounts to follow through some third party list.
The greatest advantage of being on a specialized instance is, however, in the feeds: The "local" timeline shows you anything posted by anyone on your instance, while the "federated" timeline shows you anything posted by accounts someone on your server follows. On a large, general server both these feeds will be extremely crowded with all kinds of content. On a specialized instance, it's likely that both timelines will be somewhat interesting, and people might be reading it and discover your posts there as well. :)
There is no functional account migration, therefore your choice matter unless you think what you write doesn’t matter, in which case, why write at all ?
It’s very long standing issue, first issue was closed as completed but not complete
Apologies, my familiarity with some of the terms of Mastodon are still a bit rough around the edges. By relationships, do you mean your followers and who you follow?
If so, it does seem like your followers is preserved (so long as nothing inhibits the move signal), as for who you follow its not clear on the docs whether that is preserved or not (and I’ve not done an account move of my own) - but you can export a list of who you’re following from your account preferences, and then reimport it on your new account for sure.
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
When you pick "federated" you'll see all posts, independent from your instance. But that's pretty much impossible because unless you have Tusky the posts will be too fast.
So yeah, to be able to read anything you have to just read the posts on your instance, meaning it does matter which one you pick.
It’s not even the speed. It’s also the content. All from all instances seems cool until you can’t read 80% of it because it’s in another language. I’m glad those instances exist but when I have to scroll through 5 posts to see one I can read, and it’s some low-effort post (on average) the experience is not a good one
Even after all that work, you’ve gotten through 3 seconds of the world’s timeline
Local is a good one, if your instance is lively enough. Then you can add people and see boosts and your world grows nicely
I find the "explore" page super useful for exploration! Spend a few minutes twice a day or so and the content quality is quite high, great place to branch out into boosts from. On my instance, I also do my best to curate the global feed to be somewhat useful (though things to creep in at the edges, I need to do some culling now for some Misskey bridges that are pretty loud in that feed).
added in March of last year, and not sure about third party apps since I use the official interface. I find it very useful though, between that, hashtags, public lists of people to follow, and boosts, I set my feed up in about 6 hours and it's been on minimal-maintenance-mode since and serving me fine. depends on how much the niche communities you like adopt the Fediverse too, YMMV!
One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?
So… Someone deluded says it’s super easy to sign up.
Someone points out that it’s really not for a non technical person. Let’s say that someone is me, and let’s say I’m a developer.
Is it suddenly my problem? Is it now my responsibility to fix it? I already have enough problems and responsibilities, thank you. I’m already busy with work and life. I got my own things I’m working on.
There’s no responsibility at all. There’s also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone’s free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn’t look very good on you. That’s all.
Why not? Over the years I’ve had several open source projects. I’ve had many suggestions and complaints. If someone wanted to help and contribute I’d be happy, and help them if I could, but never have I expected anything. On the contrary I’ve been happy for complaints that made sense, because it gave me pointers and places to improve my software. So why do you think it doesn’t look good?
Oh, that kind is good. Constructive feedback is very valuable. But the fediverse is full of people dropping derogatory sarcastic comments or even reacting in rage, that aren’t helpful in the slightest. I should’ve made that clearer in my first comment.
Not much point in writing a PR if the idea has already been rejected (or is still hotly contested) in the issues. Most of the suggestions aren’t just write-some-code solutions, they’re design decisions, and if the project owner doesn’t agree with that decision? Well, you can fork it like glitch-soc or hometown, or you can use another project that already does what you want (but doesn’t have as much traction), or you can keep trying to convince the people running the project to accept your idea. Even quote posts, which they’re finally coming around to grudgingly accept as a possible feature, involve a lot of decisions on which posts can be quoted, who gets notified, etc.
Let’s walk though the flow a typical user would experience:
Search “join mastodon”, find joinmastodon.org
Click “create account”…
SERVERS: Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.
95% of users will bail at this point.
Scroll down to the instance search UX.
Too many options. Do I want “all regions” or should I pick my own region? Do I want “all topics” or “general”? 95% of remaining users will bail.
Pick mastodon.social, sign up.
Confirmation email takes 12 minutes to arrive. 95% of remaining users will bail.
Confirm email, log in. Click search.
Search or paste URL
Wtf does that even mean? Try entering “William Shatner”. No results. Try “Taylor Swift”. Top result is @taylorswift13@hello.2heng.xin wtf?
Go back, click “see what’s trending”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
Go back, click “find people to follow”, brings me back to “Taylor Swift”
Close site, 95% of users will who get here will never return.
I made ana count on some mastodon instance. It wasnt a deliberate decision, I just picked one that seemed interesting from a list. That’s what people recommended: find a small instance, don’t go to the big ones. Well now I don’t know what the instance was called, so I can’t log back in because I don’t know how to find it again.
When I went to try Lemmy I made of point of signing up for the biggest, most popular, instance, and I can use it in a straight forward way without worrying too much about federation. In general though Lemmy has been much more straightforward than Mastodon, which I gave up on after about 3 days, and then never used again because I couldn’t remember where I had registered.
I know the username and password, I forgot the instance. I registered through an app so the login details were saved on my keychain but the keychain points to the app, not the instance.
I’m not saying I can’t figure it out and do it better next time, but on Twitter if you forget your password you just push a button and then reset it. On mastodon if you forget your instance you’re SOL. With Lemmy I know I’m on the big main instance and it’s not a concern anymore.
I’ve gotten really tired of repeating this to people. The fediverse is, to an end user, very simple. Just imagine the days of old forums, but your account for your main forum works in most other places and all the feeds are unified. Super simple.
UX needs work, but it’s still miles better than traditional forums.
I never understood the Twitter-like format anyway. How do you find stuff you want? What advantage is there to Mastodon over Lemmy? I tried Mastodon and ended up confused and bored.
Yeah I tried Mastodon a while back and while I absolutely could have finished figuring it out, I didn’t encounter anything interesting enough in my time poking around to encourage me to stay there. While the general concepts behind navigating a federated community are still kinda foreign to me, I was able to get up and running on Lemmy with much more ease and quickly start finding content that was interesting to me.
Both are exaggerated, but fediverse apps absolutely need better onboarding and it’s a totally fixable problem, but not if the community continues to ignore it.
I disagree, it’s not as easy and normal as Twitter and Threads. Stop lying to yourselves. It’s Dev’s requirement to make it user friendly for the audience and they haven’t. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a thing people are saying lol. Devs and fanboys are so in their own bubble it’s why nothing thrives
I think the issue is that it’s not as hard as they make it out to be. It’s not plug and play but do they need everything handed to them ona silver platter
They tend to portray everything new, different and/or popular with geeks as bad or complicated, I see this as a rite of passage for the fediverse. Remember when they were shitting on computer gaming in the early days of the hobby because of who it was initially popular among?
Is this a troll post? There are multiple shortfalls that make Mastodon harder to use than twitter for the average user. Here’s a great Op-ed explaining them: arstechnica.com/…/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigr…
The tl;dr is that decentralization is no selling point for the average user and if the experience using Mastodon is any worse than using Twitter, people simply won’t switch. And there are numerous big issues with Mastodon’s usability that make it inferior to Twitter: That there is no proper way of exploring creators, that following creators is a hot mess, that Mastodon instances can block each other and thus make it impossible for their users to interact with each other. All those drawbacks come from being decentralized, while the only positive, not being ruled by a billionaire man-child, clearly doesn’t bother people as much.
I disagree. I’m super tech savy. It takes time to understand Lemmy etc. and get what you want. I’m not against this, but let’s be realistic, it isn’t as easy as Reddit for example. This is fact not opinion…
I haven’t been using it very long but I have not noticed any significant differences with Reddit for Lemmy. It seems exactly the same. You sign up, there’s default posts and there’s your personal feed where you can add and remove subs. Content is shoved in your face with zero effort. Response notifications in the top right. What is harder about it?
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