I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it’s hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don’t like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it’s the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project
Jack Dorsey is the reason why some of these perennially online personalities moved to Bluesky. The AT protocol maybe decentralized but there’s no unofficial instances of it yet (afaik).
I’m on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.
I wouldn’t consider another VC money backed app/service anymore no matter how good the tech might be. I hope we all remember the hard lessons from the fiascos from the recent months.
This brings up my main questions with mastodon and lemmy… who is going to pay the server costs at scale?
It would be nice if those mechanisms began sooner than later.
I’m tossing $10 to both a month. Many of us are doing that to avoid being the product.
It will need to be by donation and/or sponsorship, systems for which are currently in place for most of the larger instances.
My hope is to see academia, web hosts, and non-profits involved at some point too. I think the software is just too immature at this early stage to expect much in this regard. Once more advanced safeguards are in place (content filters, admin tools, etc.), it may become more viable from a liability perspective.
We will, I imagine subscription models with maybe premium features will come about over time.
We will, I imagine subscription models offering maybe premium features will appear over time.
That’s why Mastodon is my choice.
Word. Mastodon is fabulous. There’s not very many people, but I haven’t encountered many assholes. And does it ever run smooth!
It’s the best made app imo, with the best performance and design. If I had to rank them, I would rank Mastodon > Twitter > Threads > Bluesky.
I see plenty of people on BlueSky without
.bluesky.socialin their @. Doesn’t mean they’re on another instance?
That’s honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta’s Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it’s on the record that they’ve been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.
Also, remember there are a bunch of nice 3rd party options for Android, like: Tusky (personal favorite), Fedilab, Megalodon, & Tooot
I’ve been trying Tusky and Fedilab. They are better experiences for sure.
Just tried the new official app and it is much better than what it was before but the 3rd party offerings are still ahead as of now.
Just my 2 cents.
Wait Tusky is not the official app? I always assumed it was
I’ve heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter…uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, “it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use”. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Never verified this myself.
Tusky is definitely decent though.
It’s not! The official app is relatively new, and Tusky has more features, or did the last time I compared.
It’s not! But it’s my favourite too.
And don’t sleep on Phanpy, despite being a PWA it really is excellent.
Thanks for Phanpy. I like Pinafore and Fedilab, Tooot was nice - but I think I will stick with Phanpy. It is such a pretty webapp.
I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I’m part of on twitter. Ever since musk’s takeover, I’ve been using twitter less and less.
Same here. I love how fluid Mastodon’s app is, especially compared to Lemmy’s. But I scroll for a bit and there’s nothing that interests me on my timeline.
No one is going to feed you content. It’s a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.
But you gotta bootstrap it. There’s a lot of interesting people and content in it.
There’s a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.
There’s hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.
I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it’s so worth it and rewarding. So, don’t quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It’s a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.
And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.
So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.
Seriously, follow hashtags! If friends start to join boost their early posts so other people can find them too. You take the place of the algorithm on Mastodon, so you’re ultimately responsible for curating your experience.
Though I will say, don’t use the offical app. It lacks a federated timeline still, which is weird. If you like that UI though, Moshidon is a fork that adds some customization and the federated timeline, which is a neat way to see what’s goin on.
Hit “Explore” and follow hash tags to grow your list of accounts to follow. It really helps a lot! Mine used to be like 2 minutes of scrolling and I’m done for the day. Now it’s…um…I should get back to work.
I mean, isn’t that a good thing? You shouldn’t be doom scrolling anyways
Also, that’s a temporary measure. As more people migrate, there will be more content.
there is still some work needed to be done on sync for lemmy meanwhile, you can try connect or liftoff for Lemmy
Same. It feels like Mastodon isn’t anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users
Same. It feels like Mastodon isn’t anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users necessary for it to take off.
One of Mastodon’s upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don’t suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance’s users, which won’t cover interesting things from other instances (unless they’re specifically boosted).
Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don’t follow, on the topics you have an interest in.
Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.
I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can’t stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.
It’s fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That’s all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.
I find it kinda helps after using a tool to import my follows from Twitter to here
I wish I knew that existed before Twitter shut down the API. It doesn’t work anymore.
You still can. I used a tool called fedifinder to transfer my follows a few days ago.
First time I gave Mastadon a shot now. It’s nice.
Special thanks to Kbin to introduce me into decentralized social media.
Maybe I should give Mastodon another try… I couldn’t really find anyone to follow.
To get an immediate curated feed, I recommend following @lisamelton@mastodon.social. She boosts all sorts of interesting stuff from others. It’s a great way to find other accounts you might want to follow.
Another good account to follow is @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services (https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows) They highlight interesting accounts to follow.
#FollowFriday is also a nice thing.
I am here since the blackout using Jerboa, but I get an error when I click on it, doesn’t it work in the App? I tried the instance website and put it in the search bar, but it doesn’t work either and unfortunately I don’t find any tutorials how to follow mastodon users from lemmy, do you know how? Another thing I don’t quite understand: with my Lemmy account I can use other Fediverse services like mastodon. And my understanding is that kbin is not the same as lemmy, but another service such as mastodon? So why does kbin come up in my all feed but nothing from other Fediverse services?
That was my struggle too… I open it every once in a while, but it’s the same people posting similar things.
Despite mastadon being more active, it seems less lively. I guess it’s because I preferred Reddit over Twitter in the first place.
Lemmy is also pretry similar to old.reddit. No recommendation or anything so its an easy migration.
I have only used Twitter and Mastodon sporadically, but its definitely more of a pain to discover communities since its more user oriented
Longer form content is always more fun for me. Structured topics and conversations are way better to exchange ideas and shitposts.
I’m using Tusky for now. It has more customization options than the official app. One thing I don’t like about the official app is that everything looks gigantic.
I like and use Tusky on my phone, and it also works as a Pixelfed client. But it’s not very good on tablets (in landscape). It not only doesn’t maximize the width of the screen, but you can’t scroll the feed from those unused sides of the screen. And one UI feature that Tusky is missing is the indented thread-depth lines that help you keep track of all the different reply sub-threads.
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The problem with mastodon is everyone is on mastodon.social
I mean, same can be said for Lemmy, how most people are on world/ml/beehaw. Doesn’t have to be the case, though. I have two accounts on Mastodon, one on Baraag the other on Mas.to, alternative instances exist
Personally, I am non cryptodon.lol but yes you are right. It also happens with matrix as most of the people are in matrix.org instance.
How good is Mastodon in general to follow football news? Transfer rumours and all?
Not there yet - but there are bot accounts that feed you their tweets. LOL Look up the accounts you have on Twitter for news and you’ll most likely find a bot account for them on Mastodon. That’s how I’m keeping up to date.
The update is really great. Enjoying it a lot.
What’s a good way of finding people to follow on Mastadon?
I search tags, and if someone posts something interesting under a tag I like, I’ll check their page out.
Like the other user said following tags is a great way to engage with things you choose. Along the way, you’ll find people that you find interesting and then you can follow them directly. It’s much less about seeking people and more letting them come to you.
No idea. I mainly follow tags lol
One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.
There’s also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as http://fedi.directory and https://communitywiki.org/trunk .
Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you’re interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: https://fedi.garden Check out their feeds and see who posts things you’re interested in.
Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called “groups”, which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. “retweets”) every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate@a.gup.pe, and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.
@jasonwaterfalls @Elegast I’ve just starting searching hashtags and finding people to follow that way
If you’re on their mobile app, press and hold the home button for a second or so, and a list of recommended accounts will show up.
I just tried this on Mastodon’s official app (Android) and that feature doesn’t work for me.
I did open a Mastodon account. But don’t use it much 😶
I made one at the same time I joined Lemmy but Mastodon seems like a ghost town
I’m so confused by comments like this. I use Mastodon every day and it seems pretty active to me.
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Yeah, I hate the explore page on Mastodon. At least on my instance I guess. Nothing interesting there, just the same few accounts posting political takes. Or shitting on reddit/Twitter. Gets very old very quick. It’s usable when you follow hashtags but it’s really not there yet.
Not just worse, it’s also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon’s vision of an “Everything” feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.
The reason that’s an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn’t figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our “All” feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.
This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they’d run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences… when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant.
Only if you’re on an instance that already has users subbing to a ton of communities. I’m not sure how this is much different than the federated timeline on Mastodon. If I joined a small lemmy instance it would be a similar experience. I’d need to reach out to find external communities that interest me.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts.
I’ve been pretty happy on noc.social. I’ll concede that my local timeline has a skew to it due to the server I’m on but the federated timeline is a bonkers firehose from all over the place.
Regardless, my point whenever this conversation comes up is to say that yes, I agree there’s a learning curve for new users going from a monolithic service to a federated one. But I don’t think the solution is to emulate a monolithic service (i.e. everyone on mastodon.social). I think the solution is to improve the on-boarding process and provide resources so that those new users are eased into the change and can learn how to find the content they want.
Not just worse, it’s also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon’s vision of an “Everything” feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.
The reason that’s an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn’t figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our “All” feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.
This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they’d run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences… when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.
You probably found a bunch of people with niche (if any) interests and/or friends from Twitter or other social media who are active enough for your feed to be populated. A lot of people use twitter to follow news, celebrities, journalists and shitposting accounts with large following as there’s lots of discussions under tweets with massive reach. Most people don’t interact themselves at all but just scroll. Mastodon doesn’t have these big accounts as of now so there’s not much activity for the majority of regular twitter users.
Care to share some tips for someone that’s new to Mastodon? I’ve made an account but I’ve got nobody to follow on there and trying to discover new people seems fruitless because of how different the search on Mastodon is.
Start following a few hashtags. That will give you a solid starting point.
Hadn’t thought about that. Thanks for the suggestion!
It seems like Mastodon and Twitter operates on different principles or I am missing something.
Follow some hashtags. Makes it active very quickly and lets you find accounts to follow.
Mastodon app is great for people coming from Twitter but I love my Megalodon <3
Megalodon is the best!
Mastodon seems to become yet another rage cage like twitter, first thing I saw when I opened it yesterday was people bitching about politics, that’s a BIG nope for me
If you don’t care about the world, don’t follow people who do?
Thats a weird statement as you have a lot of options to change your feed and filter stuff out you don’t like.
Like all social media, you have to curate it. I follow hashtags for cats, books, writing, fandoms, etc. The rage is minimum then because my homepage doesn’t have politics or news. I actually do follow a couple of news sources, but their stuff is surrounded by an ocean of fun things so it’s not nearly as bad.
Maybe this is just how all “Scream into the void” platforms inevitably ends up.
You must’ve joined the wrong server then, because mine isn’t like that. And you can just filter out and follow the things you want as well. There’s no algorithms to automatically feed you stuff.
I didn’t even sign up, I just wanted to see what it was all about, whining about politics and general madness, just like twitter, not for me, so I didn’t end up signing
Well, you had to open some Mastodon server in your browser. And there will be differences between them, just like what’s on the front page of lemmy.world is different from the frontpage of lemmy.ml
It is extremely political, I’ve had a hard time filtering it all out. Every account posting memes tends to feel like they have a huge political chip on their shoulder. Kinda exhausting. I’ve had trouble finding the content that I used Twitter for.
I tried a lot, but Toot! is the best of the bunch.
