this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Hey, I just started using Mastodon and my experience for now is a bit mixed. I must be doing something wrong.
I don’t follow people yet but only subjects (#). Thing is, my feed isn’t really interesting. I come across german, asian, spanish posts (I’m looking for french and english content) and the vast majority of them isn’t "retweeted" (boosted ?) or even "liked". Most aren’t interesting to be quite honest and I don’t like browsing my feed. Would love to know what do I do wrong !
Unlike Twitter, hashtags don't perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it's federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don't share your interests.
If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.
In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it's more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that's just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don't have a basis for comparison. :-)
Is there no way to search hash tags across all instances at all? It seems like someone should figure that out. The ui has that connotation given how search works historically on other sites.
On a federated server system layout, that search would be tremendously computationally/network intensive as it would require somehow finding out all instances and communities within each instance and repolling the servers to get that info periodically to ensure the list is updated. A better approach would be an app (on your mobile or hosted somewhere) that would maintain a list of servers and would do that query outside of the servers that handle conversations.
Although search on a federated system seems to be almost impossible to implement at this point, I think it is a crucial step in taking back the web.
What I mean with this is: most of the people that are on the Fediverse right now seem to look very fondly on the World Wide Web as it was a decade ago. Before Social Media became gated communities, support for RSS was dropped everywhere, corporations found out that the web could be used for advertisements and tracking mechanisms were implemented.
Reddit has - until this summer - been a corner of the web where some of us still found valuable information and held discussions with real people. Back in the good old days we had homepages and blogs that we subscribed to and searched through. On Reddit we had our subreddits.
When I was looking for a discussion on a niche topic (or even honest product experience) I used
my search term site:reddit.comon Google all the time. This basically meant: I'm only concerned for the part of the World Wide Web that is reddit.com and not deluted by corporate / seo / influencer bullshit.With the Fediverse hopefully taking Reddit's place, how do we go on from here? How do we narrow down our search scope to the useful part of the web nowadays?
Is this true? I mostly subscribe to hashtags but definitely see a lot of content from outside my instance based on the hashtag alone. Is it something that instance admins can make happen with certain other instances or something?
I thought the whole point of the fediverse thing was data could be shared between instances like it works on Lemmy where you see things from all over the fediverse in your feed. I'm super new to this whole thing though so I don't really know.
To clarify, it is not that you won't see content from other instances, it is that your instance only stores content from another instance when someone on your instance has subscribed to it. So if you decided to subscribe to a bunch of things on other instances with hashtags matching your interests, then you and other people would start to see this content showing up when searching for the hashtag on your instance.
Ohhhh gotcha, appreciate the clarification, thanks!
You have to build your own algorithm. I follow a lot of artists who have moved over. You can also search the handle of a lot of larger Twitter channels - there's a bot that pulls content over from them in some cases.
Yup, I found some of those bots and they’re quite useful. I’ll try to find more. I’d also love to follow artists but I don’t know how to find out who moved on Mastodon. Guess I’ll type a bunch of names.
It takes time. Twitter (or whatever it wants to be called) has an algorithm expressly aimed at keeping you "engaged", whereas Mastodon is just a stream of toots which you see based on the time you decide to visit. Should you stick with it, eventually two things will happen:
In the end, maybe you decide it's not for you, but I've been using it for years (since 2017), and over time it's completely replaced Twitter for me. I'm keeping three accounts for different interests (and one on Pixelfed), logged into all of them using Fedilab. I actually deleted my Twitter account the day the Tucker/Tate interview hit the light of day, but I stopped actively visiting it years earlier. My mental state improved a lot over time since I moved on.
I think the lack of an algorithm to keep you engaged is what makes it better than Xwitter, and the main reason why I have a mastodon account, but I never had (nor ever will have) an account on Txitter.
Thanks for your message. I’ll keep trying, you guys gave me a lot a useful tips.
There's your problem. Find interesting people to follow in the # you are already following.
Also, Mastodon is fairly popular among countries where English isn't the most common language. Not sure why tbh.
I guess because English isn't the most common language in the majority of countries.
English is the most spoken language in the world.
True only if including when spoken as a second language. Chinese and Spanish are spoken by more people as a first language than English.
Why would that matter? English has 300 million more speakers than Mandarin. India is the largest country in the world and they speak English.
So it's just "true" period.
But why would people on Mastodon for example use English instead of their first language? That's the point. Mastodon works different from Lemmy. When I am simply writing a sort of online diary about my research project, local politics or whatever, why would it be in English?!
Only ~15% of Indians speak English, although it is a very large country so that is enough to mean it has the second most overall (behind the USA)
Doesn't mean most of those people want to speak English.
Ik heb zelf liever dat ik nooit Engels hoefte te spreken, but most people from the US don't seem to understand that.
Find interesting people in those hashtags and follow them. Not everyone posts using hashtags everytime so you’re very likely missing on a lot of interesting content. Also, if your local feed (the one where you see posts from people on your own instance) is not of your interest you may want to migrate to another more specific or general, depending on your choice.
Thanks a lot, I’ll try that !
I'm sorry you haven't had a great experience. Mastodon has been my go-to for archaeology news since leaving Reddit and it tends to have a lot less bullshit and pseudoscience right now, which I just love.
That’s nice ! I’m sure I need to get used to it a bit more, that’s why I didn’t give up yet. It’s been less than a week for mo it’d be a bit foolish to stop trying now.
I hope it improves for you.
Hashtags are a thing but you need to find people to follow who are boosting others post.
The most important is to find groups about your interests. Groups are accounts to follow who will boost every post mentioning it. This will help you to find interesting account to follow.
Boosting is important has it's how people discover new content.
my masto experience so far (starting fall last year):
1st instance: everything goes well, got a small, but nice following. at some point i find out - by accident - that i'm shadowbanned. contact support, they told me that someone complained about something and to appease them, they muted my posts from the instances public timeline ("account was not suspended because no rules were broken") without even telling me. they refuse to this day to tell my what i posted to trigger this. deleted my account after this.
2nd instance: after one (!) day a zerg army of right wing weirdos started to spam my mentions, calling me a "fed" and other well known slurs because i posted something they didn't agree with. deleted my account after this.
meanwhile i still have my 700 followers on twitter and for some reason no one shadowbanned me or tried to bully me away. guess i should just open my own instance :^)
It's just a matter of following a lot of interesting people since it has no "recommendation algorithm" or whatever. But that can be hard I guess.
I am also more into the reddit/lemmy approach of social media where you subscribe to a community rather than following individual people so idk.
That's just mastodon for you, since it has no algo. You'll get gaslighted into being told this is good despite being continued to be bored. Unfortunately what you described is the Mastodon experience currently.
Or maybe people just have to learn to build their own feed. It's honestly not hard.
This is literally what I'm talking about. You say that and then wonder why Mastodon doesn't catch on, yet every other successful social media does this. It's already evident that people don't want this by the huge numbers dropping off mastodon.
No, people are just addicted to their super engaging algos on twitter/insta/whatever, they're just unable to quit.
Engaging is another word for entertaining. I'll take that over boring liberals preaching in their echo chamber.
Did you just unironically refer to us pejoratively as "boring liberals" while also claiming Mastodon is an "Echo chamber", Cringe.
Sure, if you act like the mastodon users who are holier-than-thou preachy, yet are the harmful capitalists that create the problems they preach against. They're toxic. Not to right wingers, but to other left wingers. If you're new to these politics outside of America, I'm not right wing btw, I'm more left then they are which is why I'm not capitalist.
Mastodon is fine. Nor does it need to be as massive as Twitter.
I think the value in Mastodon rn is getting away from the algo. I think the lack of one does limit its marketability though. I never really liked Twitter but I know a lot of people who do who hate mastodon because of how complicated it feels and the lack of content.
I never felt it was too complicated, though the people unfamiliar with decentralization definitely get confused by the process of on boarding. The lack of content is still the issue for a lot of reasons. Mastodon's search is straight up broken. Also it doesn't show federations of users you're following, it can definitely extend it's social graph a lot more. They intentionally nerf it for dumb reasons thinking it somehow marginalizes people, it makes no sense.
Lemmy does do this and is why it feels a lot more exciting on Lemmy. It's also why I pretty much abandoned Mastodon since most of my time is on Lemmy at this point.
Hm, that’s too bad. Though it shows the incredible powers those algorithms have. Mastodon has been utterly bland for me but I’m not ready to give up yet.
You got to follow a bunch of people before it starts to feel worthwhile, see if anybody you know from outside of Mastodon has a profile there, or open up different instances and check out people there.
If you want you can even follow people and Communities (though on Mastodon they're called groups) from Lemmy and reply to them from Mastodon (it is a little bit clunky).
Though for best results you should try and follow people on Mastodon or similar federated microblogging platforms, since people who they follow also have a chance of showing up in your feed.
Yeah, I found out Lemmy and Mastodon are somehow related (when I, for example, came across my own Lemmy account on Mastodon).
Thanks for the tips
I feel it is a bit of a reality check in that most people actually just post mundane stuff, while certain other sites purposely promote all the rage bait and controversial topics instead, which somewhat distorts your potential world view.
The lack of an algo, is exactly why it's good. It won't try to turn you into a zombie (= it's not designed to keep you hooked).
I have the exact opposite experience and get overwhelmed by the number of notification I get on it.
The issue is people thinking Mastodon is Twitter bis. It's not. You need to understand the philosophy behind it.