The Wikimedia Foundation has joined the fediverse by setting up their own Mastodon server!
The Wikimedia Foundation has joined the fediverse by setting up their own Mastodon server!
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I have a Mastodon account since May 2022 but didn't really use it.
I recently tried to see if I find interesting accounts to follow but didn't find much that fit my interests.
Any advice on how to find good accounts to follow?
Search for hashtags first, like #TopicOfInterestToMe. Follow those. Then, look for people who post interesting stuff in the hashtags you follow. Follow them. The trick to Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. This may also be a good starting point to find interesting people to follow: https://fedi.directory/
Curating your follows does take a minute in the beginning. This is a good starting point: https://discover.fedified.com/
That's honestly kind of a short list of accounts, considering that most of the accounts listed there exist in multiple categories on the menu. And maybe this is just me being out of touch, but I didn't recognize a single person in any of the lists.
Mastodon really needs some help getting popular figures onto the platform. Hopefully Threads at least starts to open some opportunities in that regard once they begin federating.
I don't disagree. You're probably unlikely to find the same people on Mastodon that you followed on Twitter or elsewhere. Despite the growth it's still a drop in the bucket of global social media users.
If it means anything, I started out with Mastodon hoping to follow popular figures and very quickly stopped caring for that. It was a lot more fun and interesting to talk to normal people with normal lives. But maybe that's just me.
Who're you hoping to follow? I might be able to recommend a few folks.
Who’re you hoping to follow? I might be able to recommend a few folks.
That's the thing for me, is that I don't actually have anybody in particular that I want to follow. I was never a Twitter user, so I don't really have a list of accounts that I'm looking for. But as a user exploring the platform, it's always good to see names that you recognize, even if you aren't intimately interested in them.
On Twitter, if I came across a post from someone like Bill Nye, for example, I at least know who that is and what they do, and what impact that has in regards to their opinion. But on Mastodon, the top post on my feed will be from Charles Shoemaker, an Arch Linux developer with a passion for backyard composting (just making the name up, sorry to any Charles Shoemakers out there who I have just slandered). As somebody who may be just browsing the platform idly, it makes it harder to care about the content I'm seeing, if I have no idea who the people are or why I should feel connected to them.
Obviously, that's what a lot of people come here for, though. And I also get that and think it's great, but I think that it would be better-suited to a longer-form platform (perhaps a Fedi-platform that's formatted a bit more like old versions of Facebook, when they still had a focus on user-to-user engagement). I feel like microblogging is meant for feed-scrolling behavior, but the majority of Mastodon users want it to be more like full-blog engagement. Though, I'm still exploring that part of the Fediverse myself, so maybe I'm just looking at it through a narrow lens right now.
Makes sense. Could also give the mastodon community a little longer to mature.
Yeah, I wanna see how things shake out once Meta decides to federate. I think Mastodon's going to see some pretty significant shifts when that happens.
You follow the people that share the same interests than you. What are you interested in? What do you expect people suggest you? It is totally depended on what you have for hobbies or the topics you are interested in. If I tell you to follow a Football-Player, a local politician or a niche PCB Designer, what would that give you? Find out what things you are interested in and then find the people connected to those interests.