Honestly quality of Mastodon interactions is much superior to Twitter or Threads. People are just nicer and more real on fediverse. Maybe a bit of an barrier to entry is a good thing after all!
It’s shown itself with the latest kerfuffle… the discussions (apart from the occasional nutter) haven’t devolved into people calling each other nazis yet. In fact some have been positively educational.
It might seem like there’s little traffic on the site… until you say #Ukraine then all of a sudden you’re going to be deluged with some of the most unhinged liberals on this side of the internet.
I only have the same issue with Mastadon that I do with Lemmy, I have no idea what instance to join. This one I’m apart of now for Lemmy I randomly joined when the admin said he’d accept reddit refugees who wanted to try out Lemmy.
If anyone has any suggestions for good instances to pick I’d give Mastadon a try. Otherwise, it’s a nightmare for people like me (who’s been compared to Chidi from The Good Place in terms of my overthinking and decision making).
Instance is like ISP. It’s an important part of the infrastructure, and in principle it does matter, but for 90% of cases it doesn’t make much difference.
Unpopular opinion I know. But lots of people who would love Mastodon never sign up because there is such unreasonable emphasis on choosing an instance. Just pick a large stable one, then you can switch if you want later once you get to know the platform.
Regarding lemmy, some instances like lemmygrad, hexbear and in part lemmy.ml are quite against free speech, often removing comments from other instances in threads that are… Politically charged. I would definitely avoid those but can’t see much difference between the rest
It’s never really been an accurate measure… it’s a hard thing to do, since federation is so loose. The estimate varies between 10m and 14m users currently (I presume ‘active’ users is based on posts).
Yep, not unknown as in uncounted as described in the post, but the other users question was more about instances they don’t know about which is what I meant to address
I like Lemmy a lot, and I liked Reddit before. I never really liked Twitter, just followed some NASA accounts that told what certain probes/landers/rovers were doing. I’m interested in Mastodon because federated platforms seem to sustainably fill the gap the big 5 are trying to enlarge. What kind of content are you guys getting from there?
Lemmy was kind of jarring at first, but extensions like the universal link switcher help a lot. Any stuff like that to help onboarding Mastodon? Thx folks.
I had never seen this before today, but it’s what I’ve been low-key looking for every time a followed link logs me out. My Lemmy experience was already good, but you just made it even better. Thank you so much for taking the time.
The only thing I use it for so far is to follow ARS Technica as they don’t have a mobile app, so I just subscribe to their news feed through Mastadon. I was never a Twitter user really so I only do it to support the platform.
Since the protest, I’ve really cut back on social media anyway so that’s good. But Lemmy fits as much as I need this stuff.
I never really liked Twitter, either, and joined Mastodon in 2019 for fun. I’m very active in it, now, as I have spent the time curating the stuff I want to see. I interact with watercolor artists, green technology enthusiasts, “good news” orgs, sustainability advocates, and travel photographers. It takes a bit of work to set up, first, but the biggest thing is to search keywords as hashtags and follow everyone you think you might like and interact often with them. You can always unfollow, later.
If aomeone posts a direct link to another instance, you’ll be brought to the version of it on your own instance instead of moving sites. This means you stay signed in etc.
Unfortunately not directly. However, the request it makes will trigger federation if it wasn’t already triggered, so using it sometimes makes federation happen which will make it work for future users/your later self.
I was for a long time unable to understand the appeal of the structure of Twitter/Mastodon.
Recently I have become an active Mastodon reader (reader; I have made no public posts). I realize now that it is basically an RSS reader: you follow sources (people/organizations) you are interested in and get to read those in reverse-chronological order. If you aren’t an organization, celebrity, journalist, activist, politician or otherwise someone whose thoughts people in the outside world would care about, then there is no real point in ever posting anything there; people will not read it anyway because they aren’t following you. This is unlike the discussion-forum structure of Reddit/Lemmy where ordinary people are meant to participate.
It’s not necessarily as one-sided as newsfeeds. Regular people can still publish and have a small audience of their own. That’s why Twitter, Mastodon etc. are classified as microblogging platforms.
Yeah, I treated Twitter as a RSS platform where I could follow subject matter experts like scientists and writers and artists I liked.
I also used it to follow people and groups that weren’t like me so i could learn. Like, “disability twitter” opened my eyes to some things I took for granted, because you had regular people dealing with those things just talking back and forth about it. If I shut my mouth and just listened, it opened up a whole new world.
For small-time creators making either art or science, Twitter was a good platform to get little chunks of info out to your followers. I don’t know that Mastodon fills those shoes yet, but I hope it will.
I follow hashtags on Mastodon sort of like how I follow communities on Lemmy, but instead of “content” I get quick thoughts from people. It’s different but, as someone who also didn’t use Twitter, it’s nice to have a space where the barrier to engagement is a bit lower; you need a thought, not a link or discussion, and sometimes that’s enough to prompt engagement.
It’s more a question of culture imo, not necessarily site design. I’ve seen a few communities use reddit for microblogging (posting quick half formed thoughts in self post). No reason it couldn’t happen on lemmy
What kind of content are you guys getting from there?
For me it’s probably best described as “background chatter”, so mostly a bunch of different news sites that aren’t important enough for me to go into my RSS feed, bots posting notifications, and random thoughts from bloggers.
Any stuff like that to help onboarding Mastodon?
There are those that help you to stay on your home instance as well, but the big one for me is StreetPass for Mastodon, which finds and collects Mastodon accounts as you browse the web. That way you can organically build your network without much effort. You’d be surprised how many accounts from news sites, open source projects and people with blogs you can find that way.
Basically, it’s 727 servers that weren’t taken into account before due to a connectivity error. I also wonder if Mastodon counts the alternatives, like Akkoma and Misskey for that regard, or if the increase is actually accounting for those only now. It’s unclear what the error was, Eugen doesn’t go into detail on the thread.
Add comment