So, I don’t use Mastodon for the same reason I never used Twitter (I don’t need a microblog and I’d rather read other people’s regular-sized blogs), but point 2 sounds like a problem. How do you decide who to follow, when you’re working from a blank slate? I presume you need to see several of someone’s posts before you can know if you’d like to follow them, so if Mastodon doesn’t show you any posts by default how do you get started?
If you’re only interested in topics then switching from another social network to fediverse isn’t so bad. But a lot of the twitter userbase is there because they want to follow people not topics. If you’re into journalism all the journalists are there. If you’re in the art world all the artists are there. Prior to musk it was easy to know that you were following who you thought you were. And the value is in that group of people all being there.
It’s like how it’s not a big deal for me that I quit reddit to come here, but I still have to maintain a Facebook and LinkedIn presence for my career. I can’t (yet, anyways) tell people I meet at conferences to look me up on fediverse and then have to explain what that is and how it works and make sure they follow the right account name from the right instance.
start searching the platform for things you’re interested in and follow people with interesting related posts. after a while you’ve got an actual personal feed
So, I don’t use Mastodon for the same reason I never used Twitter (I don’t need a microblog and I’d rather read other people’s regular-sized blogs), but point 2 sounds like a problem. How do you decide who to follow, when you’re working from a blank slate? I presume you need to see several of someone’s posts before you can know if you’d like to follow them, so if Mastodon doesn’t show you any posts by default how do you get started?
It does show you your local and federated timelines. You can also follow hashtags for topics you might be interested in.
If you’re only interested in topics then switching from another social network to fediverse isn’t so bad. But a lot of the twitter userbase is there because they want to follow people not topics. If you’re into journalism all the journalists are there. If you’re in the art world all the artists are there. Prior to musk it was easy to know that you were following who you thought you were. And the value is in that group of people all being there.
It’s like how it’s not a big deal for me that I quit reddit to come here, but I still have to maintain a Facebook and LinkedIn presence for my career. I can’t (yet, anyways) tell people I meet at conferences to look me up on fediverse and then have to explain what that is and how it works and make sure they follow the right account name from the right instance.
start searching the platform for things you’re interested in and follow people with interesting related posts. after a while you’ve got an actual personal feed