Does anyone have any advice here on how to make your Mastodon less eurocentric? I do regular searches, follow people from outside Europe/US whenever I come across them, etc, but it’s quite slow, hard work. I was wondering whether there is a more strategic way - ie is there a list of instances that are not Europe/US based, and from which I could follow one person each or something? Not interested in changing my own instance, just to get more global connections. #Eurocentrism
I feel exactly like you, missing voices from the world. Since our mainstream media give us headlines every time Trump or King Charles take a piss, our attention is heavily skewed. Social media could change this.
I follow people from the global south, because this is what truly enriches my experience of the world, while I hope that by this a) they feel more welcome here and b) with a network effect, they might boost content from their mutuals.
Similarly, I am more generous with boosts for people from non-western countries (I very rarely would boost local US news, the folks there are enough in numbers and networks), just to equilibrate things a little bit and help them to get discovered by sombody else.
Of course, language is an issue. I usually boost only posts in English, which is quite imperialist in itself 😐
This is a heavy barrier for communication...
Latin America: is quite active, but of course, mostly in Spanish. I was even thinking about making a second account tooting exclusively in Spanish. This would be probably the most revolutionary thing to do instead of being active in the international, but very northern community
Africa: the number of accounts is still small, but growing. I have already a nice number of mutuals from the region.
From arab countries we several journalists.
South and South East Asia: the best discussions about food 😅
Its not always only people living actually in these countries/regions. Some are expats or have some special relation with some country. Colouring the whiteness is a thing, though.
I'll try to get some lists ready for this followfriday. Maybe we can do something. 😊
I do it mostly via the "all servers" feed. And once in a while I spend 10 mins following new people for the express purpose of forging connections to new instances.
I want to enlarge my world too. I feel decently connected to U.S., Europe, and Aus/NZ. Less so Central/South America, and much less so Asia and Africa. I think I only follow two accounts that I'm sure are in Africa. I'd love more African connections, I'm super curious about life there.
Hola from Puerto Rico, I'm still feeling my way along to discover the fediverse and have found that following news posts from the geolocations that pique my interest helps me find other interesting things/peoples in that region
Thank you SO much for all this advice Petra! Some of these things I do already, many I don’t, or not enough. Like notifications for individual people - had completely forgotten that exists.
@pvonhellermannn I think it depends on your interests and who you want to follow. I find following hashtags helps me find interesting things. But languages can get in the way.
Here some accounts I like to follow, that post in English or are bilingual:
@pvonhellermannn
My #Taiwanese contact mentioned that they have a timezone issue to reach EU/US follows too. But my feeling is that the non-western sphere may not be very Mastodon adapted yet
@kofanchen thank you! Yes, that’s my impression too. But i am now also wondering whether decentralisation is initself a disincentive for marginalised communities - the beauty of Twitter as it was (and yes, i know, always corporate etc etc) was that it enabled all those communities to reach the whole world. It’s a shame if decentralisation works against that
@pvonhellermannn
I have the opposite problem, I see too many USA centred posts, so much so that I actively don't follow back many USA accounts. Sorry to all those Americans that I haven't followed, it's nothing personal, I just want to see more UK/European posts.
@nick_appleyard yes, i have noticed this too! but it's all Australia, US, Europe - all mostly white, basically . I try and try and to get outside this bubble, i honestly do, but it's such hard work. I think it may be just that mastodon as a whole has not yet taken off elsewhere, but i am just wondering whether the difficulty of making global connections is part of the problem. I don't know.
@pvonhellermannn it's work, because the servers are disconnected by languages. https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list check by countries, then open indstance and go through the local timeline and just follow people you think are interesting.
Even better create an account, because then you can finde people by Hashtag that fit better your interests.
Or move your account to mastodon.social. It's the biggest, most connected server (check the federated timeline)
@bookstardust thank you! yes, i have wondered too whether mastodon social would have been better for that reason. but don't want to move (too lazy and too vain, if i am honest - don't want to lose all my existing toots). But also: I follow many on mastodon social and they follow me - i thought that means I can access the whole instance anyway? still a bit confused about all this. #Fediverse#Mastodon
@pvonhellermannn no, sadly. What matters are the people following people on mastodon.green afaik. You can only see the connceted people with the people on your server.
I could only find Korean people, by looking through the hashtags of a korean server. By luck i found 1 Account from South Africa and 2 Accounts from Latin America.
It's really hard and the biggest downside of dezentralisation.
@bookstardust Ah, thank you for clarifying that. That is a shame. Yes, that's a real downside and one that i wish we could find a way to consciously address. Without it boiling down to manually having to do a lot of work to somehow find different people from different places, and not really succeeding anyway.
@pvonhellermannn I think it's just a matter of which instance you're on, it seems random...universodon is almost exclusively US and it's quite hard to find other stuff unless you search about for non US people to follow.
@Judeet88 Yes, I think you may be right. I joined Mastodon Green at the beginning because I liked its ethos and practices (and because I got an invite from someone!) and initially believed all those saying that your instance doesn't matter, you can connect anywhere you like. But increasingly noticing that Ma Green is quite small and very European, and that has probably really shaped my Mastodon experience. It SHOULD be possible to forge global connections wherever you start from, though.
@Judeet88 Ah, I didn't know you could do 'all servers'. Was just going to say that I really notice when I search particular words, names or hashtags: I am often surprised just how little a term comes up, and then realise that that is because I can only ever see what those who I am somehow connected to have ever said. I absolutely love the Fediverse and all it stands for, but do think this is a weakness, if indeed a Fediverse feature, not just my due to my own ineptitude
@pvonhellermannn I don't think you can 'see' who else people you follow are following either which makes it even more difficult to find those you want.
@Judeet88@pvonhellermannn You can see it! There's this great tool for finding people in your extended network. Not necessarily helpful for OP's question, but just in general for finding more people who you may find interesting and probably aren't on your server. https://followgraph.vercel.app/#searchForm
@pvonhellermannn In fact, you don't even need an account there to follow their feeds. You could just go to https://mastodon.social/public/remote
same on other servers. Having a backup account can sometimes be nice though.
I may be misunderstanding you or Mastodon, but initially i did also think that #Hashtags reached or went across all instances- that when you search a hashtag, you see everyone who had used it. But over time I learned (from others here) that when you search a hashtag, you still only see toots from people who are connected to you or others on your instance, not everyone on the Fediverse who ever uses it. Like: nothing reaches/searches everyone @FediTips
Thank you! I didn’t actually so much mean that i had personal technical problems with mastodon (though no doubt i do) , it was more just general reflections on how its federated, decentralised nature (all good!) mean it is is more difficult to really connect different groups and contributes to #Eurocentrism here, and how it could be overcome.
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