In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
Mastodon is cool, and I’d use it more if I could get used to the format. The Lemmy/Reddit forum style is my preference.
Mastodon is a good reminder of why algorithmic feeds exist
The option for a chronological feed is nice, but without an algorithm filling in the gaps it’s really hard to get started on there
Meh, I’m sick of all the algorithmic crap. The internet used to be better when people needed a couple brain cells to use them.
“content recommendation is only for stupid people” is a brand new form of gatekeeping that i haven’t heard before!
I completely agree. I like the concept of Mastodon and like that it exists, but I just can’t get into the idea of following individual or organizations rather than topics. Thankfully Lemmy is a thing.
FWIW you can follow hashtags in mastadon If you know where to look you can see trending hashtags In other fedi clients (particularly firefish) you can configure antennae and channels to give you the ability to have pre-set feed filters and focuses (e.g. search by hashtag, keyword/subject, etc) You can also curate lists (can include people you don’t follow if you don’t want) in case you want to look at what the law or history or cycling people on fedi are talking about just now. Often when I want to change subject I’ll check to see what #lawFedi or #histodon or #biketooter have to offer today
If that sounds a bit like rolling your own algorithms, that’s probably because it sort of is
It sounds worth trying if people are good at tagging. I might have to try again.
how people find accounts they like to follow.
The low-hanging fruit is sometimes checking out posters that show up in your feed because someone you do follow boosted their post. This sort of amounts to having the people you follow nominate people for you to also follow.
(fwiw, boosting a post just shares it to your followers, liking it just notifies the poster that you liked it)
First, it’s important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you’re set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they’d be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.
It’s more work since you’re building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it’s overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.
just follow hashtags you like, that way you’ll see people who post about interesting stuff.
That’s the main reason why I’m half and half on mastodon (besides the terrible user search and onboarding). I believe the way hashtags are implemented in microblogging services is so inorganic, and I prefer having a little help finding cool posts and people through some kinda filter. Bluesky has been a better experience in those aspects for me so far.
I have the same issue on Lemmy, but at least there’s All. I can’t figure out where “All” is on Mastodon.
The equivalent to All would be the federated timeline, some apps don’t show it though, and some may call it something else.
