Since I’ve been on Lemmy, I don’t know what my use is for Mastodon anymore. It’s dead on there anyway. I don’t have anyone to talk to and nobody responds to my posts.
You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you’ll get likes and boosts.
And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it’s quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.
Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.
“Creating your feed” is an essential part of of enjoying mastodon. Hashtags are the single biggest thing but also
- groups help surface new material
- you can follow lemmy/kbin users (you can also follow communities but you only see boosts)
- you can subscribe to peertube creators
- you can follow pixelfed users if you want more pictures in your feed
- etc
When you follow hashtags do they bring people from other instances to your feed? Or does the search only fetch things from your own instance?
Edit: spelling
The key word here is “connected” instances. You don’t find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.
This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.
When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.
Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don’t have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.
This has been very illuminating, thank you!
I saw a lot of comments about hashtags to follow. It’s right. You must follow them to find people to follow.
But, it’s missing a part of how to find people to follow. Boosting is essential. A way to boost automatically a toot is to use groups. You mention the group about the topic and your toot will be boosted. You need to follow these groups to find people. You feed will be less empty by following groups.
could Lemmy extend its functionality and UI to essentially become an active part of Mastodon?
it’s almost the same tech, no?
That’s Kbin
oh sick that’s something i would love to see in Lemmy to expand the Mastodoniverse
I felt like this the first time I made an account, but that’s because no one told me I had to follow hashtags, and I only used the official app where you can’t even do that!
But now I know all that and I’m using a third-party app, my experience is much better. For example, I posted a question about a book series last night, added all the relevant hashtags and then this morning had about 8 or 9 replies from people all helping with my question.
We’re so used to algorithms and being able to just search for particular keywords which will then show up that we’ve forgotten how social media used to work.
I’m using the default mastodon app and I don’t have much replies too. May I know what 3rd party app you’re using?
I can recommend Tusky, easy and simple. Otherwise Fedilab is nice too. Both for Android and available on f-droid.
I’m using Tusky on Android. More features and more customisable to how I want it.
If you’re on iOS, I’m not sure what apps are available on there.
Yeah you assumed correctly, I’m on IOS. Still searching the perfect app though. I love the idea of federation and won’t give up on mastodon just yet.
The only two iOS ones I’ve heard of are Ice Cubes and Ivory.
No idea whether they’re any good though, I’ve just seen them pop up on Mastodon.
Yeah I saw those 2 also. I might try ivory though. It comes highly recommended but downside is it’s a subscription service. I don’t mind paying but I hope there is one that I can pay just one time.
Let’s see
Ok, don’t use it, easy.
I don’t think it’s a Mastodon problem. It’s a generalist social network problem. Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, why are we using those? For some, it’s “to keep in touch” with friends and family, and they’re happy seeing any activity, preferably things that makes them smile (that’s more Facebook). For others, it’s a mean to build street cred in their industry by publicly saying on topic things that sound smart (that was Twitter). But if you look for interesting discussions on things you like, in order to learn something, they’re terrible at that. It’s where specialized communities, discussing only one topic, shine. It used to be forums, then reddit, now lemmy. RSS is also a very good way to get that kick.
