I’m pretty new to the whole Lemmy thing, but I figured I’d ask peoples’ opinions on whether it’s worth it to get into Mastodon too now that I’m officially a member of the Fediverse.
Is it active? Is it worth it? Have you had good experiences there?
I know you’re specifically asking about Mastodon but consider checking it firefish as well. It’s got a lot of quality of life features that Mastodon still does not. That said the app situation is a lot rougher. Most Mastodon apps do work with firefish but every now and again something seems to break. If you’re looking for an instance firefish.lgbt is pretty solid but a little on the small side. Of course everything federates so that should be a huge issue unless you’re really into local.
I have an epic experience there
I’ve only been on mastodon for a couple of days, but yes it is active, and depending on what you’re after it might we worth it. For me, it seems to be a nice mix of keeping up to date with things and people I already know, and at the same time stumble upon (related) things I did not yet knew about.
You will have to put in some effort to follow people/accounts/hashtags, but that’s kinda fun. Just try it out!
I really like Mastodon, so much so that I have several accounts for different purposes. You do need to invest a bit of time into following a good number of people who post stuff you like, though. I was pretty active on Twitter and now I’m pretty active on Mastodon and I like Mastodon better, but I had to spend a little time searching hashtags for people posting cool stuff.
One thing that I haven’t seen anyone mention is moderation - your experience will be better with a well-moderated, well-run server, otherwise you’ll have issues with spam and maybe worse. Generally a medium-sized server based around a subject of interest or a geographic location works well, where the admins are actively involved in the community.
Yes, very active, there is the #introduction tag there where you can find people (and people find you).
Mastodon is very active after you start following enough people and hashtags to populate your feed. It’s a bit rough to get started though: no algorithm means no content (or very random content in the local/federated feeds) until you build it up for yourself. But once you hit critical mass, I’ve found it a much nicer experience than I ever got on Twitter.
I run into the issue of people randomly using hashtags. For example, I follow #reddit, but then all I see is porn. And if I search for, say, MKBHD, then I see at least two dozen of them. Some are “legit” retweeting bots, others are just impersonators. I’ve been trying to use Mastodon since a couple months back but I never really got into it. We need more persons of significance and media outlets to join. I am disappointed that, after NPR quit twitter, they don’t have at least some kind of presence on Mastodon.
That was my experience too, following widely used hashtags just results in a mess of people tagging everything personal with them, in foreign languages, or sometimes even irrelevant things just to get clicks. And all this content is treated equally when it comes to populating my home page. I’ve had some luck following individuals but that’s also just random chance who you find. It really needs the bigger content creators and personalities there in order to take off as twitter replacement so there’s some consistency and quality.
