Experience on Mastodon
When Musk bought Twitter and "unleashed free speech" on the platform, it made me curious about other social media platforms, specifically one where data and privacy are much more respected.
That inevitably lead me to mastodon. I opened an account and all that, but I must be doing it wrong, or maybe mastodon just isn't what I want it to be.
I don't really know who or what to follow on there that would create an experience that draws me in.
In fairness, it could just be that I am not following interesting accounts but I follow 7 accounts
- grapheneOS which is just updates about their O.S.
- Daniel Micay who hasn't posted in a loooong time
- James Gunn rarely posts
- nixCraft is just memes
and the rest are just news outlets like Ars Technica, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Propublica, which ain't bad but like, they post links to long-form articles, which isn't really what you are really looking for if you are just doing a light skim of your feed for a quick 5 minutes.
Are interesting folks not on mastodon? or I am just not following the right accounts? Im interested in tech stuff and social issues and some politics (but not much cause that can get doom scrolly fast)
Twitter styled "everyone-in-one-room-shouting-eternally" social networks are a bad concept to begin with. For maximum interest, they need a huge numbers of users, many eagerly seeking their five seconds of viral fame. Usually that comes in the form of a joke, a cute animal photo, some kind of nsfw media, a hot take regarding [current issue], or a diss reply to a popular account.
With that said, I'm pretty burnt out on the concept and stopped posting to my twitter, bluesky, and mastodon.xyz accounts. Mastodon not really gelling with me forced me to think critically about why it wasn't meeting my needs and from there, I figured out there wasn't much in any form of microblogging that I really enjoyed to begin with.
With regards to mastodon in particular,
The fediverse puts too many technical barriers for most folks (e.g. following accounts on other instances), and the majority of the rest are sidelined by the catch-22 of any fledgling social network: Not enough users to build momentum and draw in more users.
Twitter was an exceptional way to get actually breaking news, get updates from creators, and get updates from organizations. It is, and almost always has been, a terrible platform for discussion or debate.
For example, you could often find out if a service (like AWS, or GCP) is down faster by checking Twitter than you would by checking the actual service status page. You could get more information about a natural disaster (tornado, fire, etc..) in your local area.
I don't think I've gotten the same early-to-midlife Twitter experience from Blue Sky or Mastodon.
I've always felt that RSS is sadly hyper underutilized for the first part of this.
I really should be able to click a button on your website or whatever and get notifications of whenever X event occurs. Sadly a lot of RSS feeds wind up swamped iwth lots of "no i don't care about that, just let me know when your book is out" content, but even then its 10000x better than twitter for it.
Unfortunately there's not nearly as clean an onramp to getting your RSS feed setup compared to getting your social media account going.
I also found it hard to find interesting people to follow on Mastodon, but to be fair the same was true on Twitter and Bluesky. It takes time. People with impressive resumes can have mediocre feeds. When other people make recommendations, I often find that they're not for me.
But for what it's worth, here's a guy who fixes pinball machines and tells stories about unlikely things going wrong with technology, as well as jokes and other random stuff:
https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops
I’m on infosec.exchange, but mostly follow people on other instances.
I follow Lisa Melton as my “Mastodon Algorithm”.
@keenan@social.lol and @annie@social.lol for general vibes and their blogs.
Then some game dev folks and web dev folks (like @sarajw@front-end.social and @zachleat@zachleat.com).
And @selfcare@hachyderm.io for reminders to take a minute to breath a couple times a day.
You can also check out some of the “starter packs” here: https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/, though not sure how good any of them are.
The trick for me was to focus on following hashtags rather than accounts. Then, when someone cool posts with one of your hashtags, follow their account. When they repost something cool from someone else, follow that account. This will help you grow a network of cool people you want to hear from. Be the algorithm.
Bonus tip: install the Street Pass for Mastodon browser extension. Then, as you’re browsing the web, you’ll also be discovering more accounts to follow.
StreetPass for social media handles is a very cool idea: https://streetpass.social/
I do this too, although one issue I have is that it drags in posts in non-English languages. Not being able to read those, they just seem like clutter to me. I did see a setting to ignore posts in other languages but it doesn't seem to work, at least in the mobile app.
Adding to the previous recommendations, a great UI also helps immensely to make your feed(s) more lively, and so easier to find who to follow.
I personally use https://phanpy.social/, that can be configured to have several columns. Mine are
https://ibb.co/XZWLmGrd
Don't forget that you can also follow hashtags! The related posts will go in your Following timeline.
Here are some that I enjoy:
curl)If I'm feeling bored, I'll click over to trending and scroll through the live feeds a bit.
I did run into one antivaxxer, whom I promptly reported for rules violations and muted. It's a pretty nice place.
I have a podcast handle on gamedev.placeand enjoy the community a lot. It’s small, but fun and the guy running it seems like a chill dude.
It does seem like a lot of bigger name game devs split their time to bluesky, if not a majority of it. But they all have the same tacit fear of it being a ticking timebomb to enshittify in the next 5 years or less.
Your mastodon experience can vary quite widely depending on which instance you're on, and so on, and how you approach it as a platform too. I don't really take it as an X/Twitter "replacement", but as an alternative I use for other purposes. I'm on a somewhat restrictive (i mean this in a good way, in terms of rules/federation/politics they're extremely careful) instance, and have followers / follow others that are artists, creatives, techies, and other regular people just doing cool things or that have good discussions/takes on things.
I am on bsky, more as a "replacement" for Twitter, but even then, I'm extremely careful about curating my social feeds these days, so I keep it to a minimum. I can't handle the typical "BREAKING NEWS" political doom scroll accounts and the like. I keep it to individuals mostly (artists, musicians, curators, etc) that have interesting things to say or post. I've just lost all desire to return to the Twitter-like experience and make it like it was, which was often just an alarmist feed of bad news, political cheap shots/takes, etc- "brands", companies, big names, celebs, popular figures, politics, etc- none of which are accounts I ever want to see ever again
I bookmark (in a browser) a few account pages on instances my instance doesn't federate with (because sometimes good people can be on poorly-moderated instances, etc) - like people that talk about AI, tech, privacy/security, etc- and also aren't politically bankrupt (Tante.cc, Dan McQuillan, Deviant Ollam, Em on the Internet) and artists/leftists like Municipal Adhesives
Sometimes entire instances (like Marveilles.town) are full of cool and interesting people that have a vibe that works for me- but again, they're your everyday artists, creators, musicians, and people doing cool things- so, I don't really know what you find "interesting" or not, I guess, but to me, they seem to be all over mastodon, they might just not be big/popular accounts
Depending on what instance you're on- dig into your local and federated timelines and see if you can find interesting people- that's how I find them, or I find them elsewhere on the internet (videos/talks/cons, blogs, websites, etc) and then follow their mastodon accounts.
Discovery might not be the easiest/best designed thing on mastodon, so that may contribute to making it difficult to come across cool accounts, though I find the lack of discoverability somewhat a plus in terms of it kinda limiting abuse a bit (some instances even have searching posts for keywords turned off for that kind of reason) so it's a delicate balance I guess
My experience so far is somewhat lukewarm too. However, I did find an account that daily posts a themed list of interesting accounts to follow: @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services . It is a service associated with this directory: fedi.directory
I have a personal GoToSocial server running, so I don't even get the local messages one would see on a Mastodon instance, and my feed isn't that dynamic yet. But I don't really worry too much about it. It will grow in time.
I follow around 500 people and am relatively happy with what I see in Mastodon but I also don't use Mastodon much. It can be an echo chamber at times--but other times I am pleasantly surprised with some of the diversity of opinion that I see.
Click on the "Explore" link ( renamed "Trending" on mastodon.social )
You get a feed of the most upvoted and boosted post regardless of subject.
You always get interesting stuff to scroll through and it is a nice way to find accounts you want to follow.
You can also try searching on #TheSubjectYouAreInterestedIn and then follow that HashTag.
Have you tried finding Starter Packs? That's how I got started on Bluesky and a quick Google search confirms Mastodon has the same thing. Found my favourite sports writer and then used his starter pack to follow Sports writers I liked, had heard of or covered something I cared about.