The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me:
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
If your local feed is too quiet, slowly microdosing the firehose to curate your personal feed is probably the best approach.
The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile.
Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.