In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
Mastodon is cool, and I’d use it more if I could get used to the format. The Lemmy/Reddit forum style is my preference.
just follow hashtags you like, that way you’ll see people who post about interesting stuff.
That’s the main reason why I’m half and half on mastodon (besides the terrible user search and onboarding). I believe the way hashtags are implemented in microblogging services is so inorganic, and I prefer having a little help finding cool posts and people through some kinda filter. Bluesky has been a better experience in those aspects for me so far.
First, it’s important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you’re set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they’d be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.
It’s more work since you’re building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it’s overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.
I have the same issue on Lemmy, but at least there’s All. I can’t figure out where “All” is on Mastodon.
The equivalent to All would be the federated timeline, some apps don’t show it though, and some may call it something else.
how people find accounts they like to follow.
The low-hanging fruit is sometimes checking out posters that show up in your feed because someone you do follow boosted their post. This sort of amounts to having the people you follow nominate people for you to also follow.
(fwiw, boosting a post just shares it to your followers, liking it just notifies the poster that you liked it)
Mastodon is a good reminder of why algorithmic feeds exist
The option for a chronological feed is nice, but without an algorithm filling in the gaps it’s really hard to get started on there
Meh, I’m sick of all the algorithmic crap. The internet used to be better when people needed a couple brain cells to use them.
“content recommendation is only for stupid people” is a brand new form of gatekeeping that i haven’t heard before!
I completely agree. I like the concept of Mastodon and like that it exists, but I just can’t get into the idea of following individual or organizations rather than topics. Thankfully Lemmy is a thing.
FWIW you can follow hashtags in mastadon If you know where to look you can see trending hashtags In other fedi clients (particularly firefish) you can configure antennae and channels to give you the ability to have pre-set feed filters and focuses (e.g. search by hashtag, keyword/subject, etc) You can also curate lists (can include people you don’t follow if you don’t want) in case you want to look at what the law or history or cycling people on fedi are talking about just now. Often when I want to change subject I’ll check to see what #lawFedi or #histodon or #biketooter have to offer today
If that sounds a bit like rolling your own algorithms, that’s probably because it sort of is
It sounds worth trying if people are good at tagging. I might have to try again.
Put it simply I just hate ads. Anything that puts in ads is terrible. Including Sync for Lemmy who seems to have completely missed the point of getting the hell away from Reddit.
The next terrible thing is automatically generated content and bots, but I guess those are also really just ads.
I disagree. I hate ads with a passion too. But as long as we can pay a sum to remove it, it is fair to have a free option with ads. A kinda unlimited “demo”.
We are fools for thinking anyone would give away their own time and effort for free forever. We have completely lost the perspective of how much things should cost because of how much we’ve taken for granted that was paid for with our personal data. And the biggest fools is those who think most software developers and server admins can live reliably on donations alone.
Though Youtube is taking the ads a bit far, maybe. One shouldn’t scare away users before they have even become customers.
Absolutely agree with your comment.
I don’t really know the solution either… I can’t afford to pay for all the things I enjoy online.
I was considering supporting 1 Twitch streamer I enjoy until I saw subscription cost. And if I paid that for every streamer or YouTuber I enjoy, I’d be broke in a single day lol.
I get so much incredibly good info and discussions online about my hobbies, all for no charge.
I used to subscribe on Patreon to my most useful resources/people, but in the end I just could afford it and had to cancel all my Patreon
I hate ads but I don’t understand how the internet would function without ads. No one could afford it
Yeah, I’m not rich enough to pay for every site and service either. A site like rockpapershotgun I left when it paywalled most of its contents, it wasn’t important enough to me to pay for. I’ve never paid for reddit, but i probably should have by how much i used it. Not that I will do that after what they’ve pulled lately. I donate to a fediverse server to put my money where my mouth is and at least pay for what I want to keep alive.
It would take some adjustment, but ads and data harvesting are the core problem to the enshiftification of the entire internet. You can’t have it both ways. We have this endless game of cat and mouse where we keep moving to the next platform after the last one becomes unusable due to ads and data harvesting.
You have to draw the line somewhere to end this pointless cycle and it is either pay for software and services or have people do only what they want to when they want to (FOSS). It really doesn’t cost that much if it isn’t attempting to compete with other software that grew with ad and data harvesting money.
Um Linux and FOSS, kinda show you wrong in that many people are happy to see others use their work for feee.
We are fools for thinking capitalist solutions are the solutions we need.
So you really believe that FOSS is only developed by people doing this for free. Not saying there are no hobby projects developed by people in their free time but thinking that is how it works is pretty dumb. Postgresql, Mozilla, various Linux distributions providing “business solutions” - hell, even the Lemmy developers are funded.
You are a fool if you think all Foss developers are anticapitalist idealists.
I disagree. Paying to remove ads is one of the core problems with ads. If the only way to develop your software is either to frustrate them enough to pay to remove ads or have ads then your software shouldn’t exist. You don’t get to do something bad just because there is an option to pay them to stop doing that bad thing. That doesn’t make it right. The whole concept is basically like a really mild protection racket.
This is such an unbelievably naive take. People’s time is worth something. Relying just on donations from a small percentage of users here and there is not going to cut it for someone who is developing the software full time.
The second ads are required the customer stops being the users and starts being the advertisers. This starts the enshittification snowball shitball, Randers.
It’s a good thing you have the option to pay to remove ads and stay the customer, then
I’m working on the app full-time and the ads / subscriptions cover development costs.
I just wanted to say I greatly appreciate everything that you’ve done for reddit/lemmy in app development. Without Sync I’m not sure how I’d browse the web without pulling out all my hair due to all the ads and inconsistencies.
That isn’t a good justification to me. If it’s ok for you then it’s ok for the rest of the world too. You might believe ads aren’t bad and that’s fine. At least we can agree to disagree on that as our opinions aren’t reconcilable. If your app can’t exist without ads then I don’t believe it should exist at all. Or any other software in the world.
That isn’t a good justification to me.
You want developers who spent years studying design and development, to spend months developing an app, to just give that app away for free?
People like you are why more and more developers join big corporations for salaried position rather than trying to make it by themselves in the indie scene. Because they know they can’t make it in the indie scene because you are too cheap to pay for their apps (either by buying the app, or by consenting to see ads)
If your app can’t exist without ads then I don’t believe it should exist at all.
Sync for Lemmy exists as a paid, ad-free version. The ad-supported version only exists for people who don’t want to, or can’t, buy the app.
When’s the last time you developed and released a full fledged software project for free?
Lemmy has gotten quite a bit of money in grants. It’s safe to say that without the grants allowing the lemmy devs to work on it full time, it wouldn’t be as functional as it is now. Getting grants really isn’t easy and that shouldn’t be the barrier to whether or not you can be compensated for your work.
If you are suggesting ads are the only way to fund software then you are mistaken. For example you can sell it for money to consumers.
Wrong. The next terrible thing is mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation. Like in the “dead internet” theory
This is only FOSS bros making a bigger deal than it should, I like FOSS I use FOSS but they need to chill a bit.
I hate ads too, but devs have to eat so why should we not pay them when we use an app or service they spend countless time making and maintaining?
Sync is a one-time payment of £17.99 / $20 to remove ads and for the amount I’ll be using this app, I think that’s absolutely fair. I’ll spend more on one takeaway pizza on a Friday night.
It would suck if Sync was the only option but it’s not. Nobody forces you to use it. You have such a hateboner for Sync it’s ridiculous. So the guy asks money for his work, who fucking cares.
It just happens to be a great demonstration that there can be no exceptions to eliminating ads. People seem to agree that ads are bad, but then have no principles or conviction when presented with the slightest inconvenience. “Guy just needs money” is not a good enough reason to change my opinion to ads are actually good. I’m not sorry. This has nothing to do with Sync or this person in particular.
It’s just the ad driven business model as a whole.
I am now very sure you are young and naive.
“Guy needs money” … for the time invested in providing something that is optional and you are free not to use.
You don’t like apps with ads then don’t
Including Sync for Lemmy who seems to have completely missed the point of getting the hell away from Reddit.
If there is one reason to support ads, only one reason, is for using Sync for Lemmy.
What allows this particular piece of software to implement an egregious dark pattern and have it be ok?
Because although it is in a very early state compared with Sync for Reddit it is also a great product.
I use Sync for Lemmy, Voyager and Summit and overall I think Summit is a better client as of now, but Sync doesn’t fall too far away.
What dark pattern for real lol, we users asked for it, the dev didn’t even care nor know about Lemmy if it wasn’t for us, he listened and now he is present around here with a very competent client.
Would the world be better for you if Sync ceased to exist LMAO.
We have different reasons for getting the hell away from reddit. I came to lemmy because reddit killed sync. I paid like $3 for Sync in 2014 and used it every day until Reddit killed it without seeing a single ad. So, not only do I disagree with Sync for Lemmy missing the point of getting away with reddit, but I also disagree with the notion that sink for Lemmy is in any way bad for having an ad - supported tier when you can pay a negligible amount of money ( $20 in 2023 ) and never see an ad again for the entire lifetime of the app.
Are there ads on Sync? I’ve been using it exclusively for the last week or so and haven’t seen a single one.
Sync is garbage. I’ve tried every Lemmy app and settled on Voyager. It’s no Relay but it’s one of the most developed Lemmy apps available.
(I’m still upset that Relay’s developer decided to play along with Spez’s new rules and start charging users for API access. It was such a good app and I’ll miss it dearly)
The problem is that #10 in this article is why 99% of people won’t leave Xitter for Mastodon. Most of the people with lots of followers on X aren’t on Mastodon. It’s really that simple. Some “influencers” need to be convinced to open up Mastodon accounts and advertise exclusive content on there for their followers. Until then, we will be stuck with a handful of journalists, Flipboard, and Stephen Fry.
I really don’t think that Mastodon needs influencers. It’s just normal people talking about normal stuff. Don’t need any “I‘m so glorious, and here’s my product that will make you think you’re glorious, too” kind of influencers there, thanks!
“Influencer” is just a word to describe a phenomenon that will naturally arise on any platform where following someone doesn’t require a follow back: some people will have a lot of followers, for whatever reason. They’ve existed as authors and columnists, radio personalities, television and film celebrities, podcast hosts, etc.
Some grow followers organically on the specific platform, while others bring their followers on from being independently famous outside the platform. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t start off as famous - all it takes is for a post or comment to go viral and then the attention is there, whether the creator wanted it or not.
I mean, you guys are stuck with me as your only real celebrity for a while… (and the Debian logo design person.)
Wow. Finally got a reply from her! Big fan of what you’re doing (you know, the Barbie movie and whatnot).
Big fan of what you’re doing.
You mean striking against the studios and shitposting on Lemmy?
I remember back in 2000s 2 or 3 guys were so misinformed that Bruce Wills himself joined the comments and explained the movie industry doesn’t work that way. Of course they didn’t believe it was him and they ended up being video called by him to “prove” it is really him. I will find that page one day. In the 90s it was common that a famous actor/producer discuss ongoing things with the fans.
Here’s an alternative question: Do we really want the fediverse to take off like big tech did?
I sort of like that this little corner of the Internet isn’t filled with a bunch of megacorporations and political bot farms trying to fiddle with our opinions to their benefit. Once it gets too big, it’s going to lose something really important. Also, I fear that it could become impossible for a little operator to run an instance anymore.
Solid point. Kind of goes back to what we want out of our social media. If we want to follow the celebrities we like, we’re probably stuck with Xitter & other data harvesters (outside of the enlightened folks like Mr. Fry). I honestly use Mastodon slightly more than I use(ed) Twitter. Barely more than not at all.
There’s a part of me that legitimately wonders how far Twitter could go as an influncer bubble. Granted this is unlikely to happen but if everyone who’s not an influencer just left for Mastodon and Twitter just became a hollow shell of influencers trying to sell products to customers who just aren’t there, how far would Twitter’s inerta carry it before anyone realized?
Preach. I hate the “bubble” that curated / sponsored feeds try to wrap everyone inside of.
Most people used Twitter and Facebook not as a social network but as a pastime. They didn’t create or post anything, but simply lurked and browsed random stuff on the platform to amuse themselves and keep up with trends. The random content in feeds that articles like these complain about were rather the main feature of those platforms for many. And this is a feature Mastodon fails to provide for its own good.
