this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I'm finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I've found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all.. maybe it's because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me
Unfortunately this is not the fault of mastodon, its community or tech behind it as much as ... nobody from twitter actually moving to mastodon. There aren't many big influencers, companies or content creators on mastodon so your feed is just random people talking about random stuff. The lack of algorithm doesn't help either since someone's random showerthoughts have the same chance of showing up for you as does something trending that you'd actually be interested in.
Follow / pin active hashtags. I have 4, #news #nintendo #xbox and #playstation. I’m a simple man
And then I get even more random irrelevant crap because everyone talking about their latest rp adventures in stardew valley tags steam, gaming, indiegaming and other general hashtags.
There's some of that, but I prefer it for something like micro blogging. I want to see different things, points of view. By contrast, I'll go to a news site for specific info. I love Mastodon because there's a unvarnished stream of information that isn't curated by algorithms. :D
Yep, everyone I followed on Twitter went to Bluesky, some made accounts on Mastodon, but none of them stuck around
One idea is to browse the hashtag #introduction and follow people whose introductions sound promising to you. The hashtag #FediTips might also be useful. If you want to follow scholars and scientists, there is this list grouped by discipline: https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon And in general, you can follow hashtags on Mastodon, e.g. "#bloomscrolling" for pictures of plants.
@Squidquid Option #1: Search for a hashtag. If it exists, and it's halfway active, follow it. No, I'm not kidding you, you can do that on Mastodon.
Option #2: the people section on fediverse.info.
Option #3: No matter which instance you're on, go to mastodon.social with your Web browser and search it for interesting hashtags. This may reveal to you more people who are interested in those topics/write about those topics.
Also, if you want to learn more about the Fediverse beyond Lemmy (and beyond Mastodon, for that matter), go follow fediversenews@venera.social. It's a public forum on Friendica. You'll learn soon enough what Friendica is.
It depends on what you are into. If you like anime (for example) you could try something broad like # (anime) [no spaces and such] & then see what other hashtags people are using from there. The same with music or something. That's what I do at least. There might be better ways but a lot of times people are into similar stuff and that can lead down different paths as well.
Sportsbots.xyz host mirrors of the popular sports writers. I follow thurrott from twit apple insider and 9 to 5 max. Tech meme is good for tech news headlines. I fill krebs on security as well. It’s better than twitter because it’s chronological and not algorithm fed
It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you're interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that's interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I've heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.
I'm interested to know which accounts to follow for lemmy news. Seems like a natural place to go when having trouble connecting like I did with fmhy before and shit just works recently.