Been using lemmy and really enjoying it. I have a twitter account that does me no good so Mastodon seemed very appealing. I joined an instance, made some posts, tried interacting with a lot of people. . . I dunno. It just never really grabbed me.
I’ve noticed that content seems to federate on lemmy better than on Mastodon even though lemmy is younger, and I’m under the impression this is true for kbin as well though I don’t personally use it. I’d love to hear how you guys feel about it - as an artist the idea of having a blog to share my creations as well as life updates is cool but man it’s just so dead
Thing is mastodon is a microblogging alternative to Twitter. Personally what I enjoy about Twitter is the people, keeping up with certain friends. They are not in Mastodon so the experience felt dull.
Lemmy is a link aggregator alternative to Reddit. Personally what I enjoy about Reddit is sharing content and discuss in a more broad way. I don’t care to know the people, but the content.
So, the issue with Mastodon is that there’s no global search and discovery. In order to be found, things have to be hashtagged. The problem with hashtagging is that twitter clout weirdos made hashtagging SO uncool that nobody, anywhere, wants to do it anymore. So, do search hashtags related to your interests and follow folks that are posting to them, but that may not get you too many hits.
If you’re on an instance that isn’t enormous, try the local timeline to identify some folks to follow. On big instances, that’s not usually useful because it’s too big a firehose.
For art specifically maybe see the stuff that curator on mastodon.art boosts: https://mastodon.art/@Curator
This is why Lemmy/Kbin is potentially cooler for some applications than Mastodon. Since communities are (a) not stigmitized like tags and (b) also mandatory, plus search exists, it’s much easier to find things! (Although there’s not yet much to be found)
I like mastodon but the content you see is only driven by two things: the people you follow and the hashtags you follow. Basically, you follow people and hashtags to effectively create your own “algorithm.” Once I understood this and really made an effort to follow both people and hashtags that interested me, my Mastodon feed became way more interesting than my Twitter feed.
I also like the quality of the interactions better on Mastodon. Because of how the whole thing works, you’re not going to get bombarded with horrible stuff in most cases (at least the chances seem to be far less for that kind of thing happening).
But it definitely takes more time and energy to curate compared to Twitter.
How do you follow hashtags?
Depends on the app you’re using but usually you just click on the hashtag of interest and then click on the + button or something similar in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s how you do it in both Mona and Ivory.
It seems there’s no button in the official Mastodon app, however on the site there is.
I gave Mastodon a small chance a couple weeks ago and just hopped on Lemmy today and I can already tell (at least as of right now) I prefer Lemmy as a platform. I’ll definitely give Mastodon another chance but I just couldn’t really get into it. I think I agree with you on the fact that the content seems to federate better on Lemmy.
Mastodon is great, until servers get shutdown, and you have to move… I moved twice in the past few years, lost so many toots that I faved, to the point that I’m discouraged…
I have an account and never posted anything because it feels intimidating to post my first…post there. (Do people on Mastodon call it post or is there a different word similar to Twitter’s ‘tweets’?).
It looks really good though, but I find it more intimidating than Lemmy / kbin!
They call them “toots” AFAIK.
