While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as […]
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
To get an immediate curated feed, I recommend following @[email protected]. She boosts all sorts of interesting stuff from others. It’s a great way to find other accounts you might want to follow.
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?
I don’t think I’ll ever make a Mastodon account, but I do like the rss feature so had been relying on that to get updates on certain projects. Now just need some Twitter accounts that haven’t moved over to do the same. Some have websites, but don’t even update it and relied solely on twitter to push update.
Twitter is mainly for self promotion than for users, so this seems pretty disruptive for them than it is for people like me.
I’ve found that my lemmy.world account can be followed by my mastodon.social account. I wonder if it is possible to log in to a mastodon client with it?
No. Lemmy and Mastodon federate using the ActivityPub protocol, but that’s not good enough for making mobile apps or other clients. They each have their own API for their apps and an app made for one federated platform won’t be able to log into another platform’s server/instance.
All your interaction with the Fediverse is done through your instance.
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
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.
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.
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 @[email protected], and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
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
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
Thats a weird statement as you have a lot of options to change your feed and filter stuff out you don’t like.
If you don’t care about the world, don’t follow people who do?
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.
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 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!
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.
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 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.
That’s why Mastodon is my choice.
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.
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.
I’m tossing $10 to both a month. Many of us are doing that to avoid being the product.
We will, I imagine subscription models offering maybe premium features will appear over time.
We will, I imagine subscription models with maybe premium features will come about over time.
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.
I’ll have to give it another try - Megalodon is my current favourite
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
Follow some hashtags. Makes it active very quickly and lets you find accounts to follow.
I’m so confused by comments like this. I use Mastodon every day and it seems pretty active to me.
It seems to me that discoverability is worse on Mastodon. Here, we have the top day sorting to see what’s going on.
Mastodon seems more likely to keep you in your bubble. I could find anything until I migrated to mastodon.social, where everyone is at.
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.
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.
https://mander.xyz/comment/749912
https://mander.xyz/comment/749912
Maybe I should give Mastodon another try… I couldn’t really find anyone to follow.
To get an immediate curated feed, I recommend following @[email protected]. She boosts all sorts of interesting stuff from others. It’s a great way to find other accounts you might want to follow.
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?
Another good account to follow is @[email protected] (https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows) They highlight interesting accounts to follow.
#FollowFriday is also a nice thing.
That was my struggle too… I open it every once in a while, but it’s the same people posting similar things.
I don’t think I’ll ever make a Mastodon account, but I do like the rss feature so had been relying on that to get updates on certain projects. Now just need some Twitter accounts that haven’t moved over to do the same. Some have websites, but don’t even update it and relied solely on twitter to push update.
Twitter is mainly for self promotion than for users, so this seems pretty disruptive for them than it is for people like me.
I’ve found that my lemmy.world account can be followed by my mastodon.social account. I wonder if it is possible to log in to a mastodon client with it?
No. Lemmy and Mastodon federate using the ActivityPub protocol, but that’s not good enough for making mobile apps or other clients. They each have their own API for their apps and an app made for one federated platform won’t be able to log into another platform’s server/instance.
All your interaction with the Fediverse is done through your instance.
I tried a lot, but Toot! is the best of the bunch.
I use it. So far I like it.
The problem with mastodon is everyone is on mastodon.social
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.
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
deleted by creator
The update is really great. Enjoying it a lot.
What’s a good way of finding people to follow on Mastadon?
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.
No idea. I mainly follow tags lol
@jasonwaterfalls @Elegast I’ve just starting searching hashtags and finding people to follow that way
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.
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 @[email protected], and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.
@AlmightySnoo NGL it doesn’t seem to have a #federated timeline still
First time I gave Mastadon a shot now. It’s nice.
Special thanks to Kbin to introduce me into decentralized social media.
I noticed it looked slightly different, but I haven’t noticed much difference
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.
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.
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.