It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?...
Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.
I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it's too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can't do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area's just not possible for me to influence.
I've found it's better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.
Weird. I don’t see any of that on my Mastodon feed.
It’s almost as if I get to choose what’s displayed in my feed instead of having it force-fed to me.
I’m thinking that perhaps someone didn’t learn how the system works and how to use it and instead just read #Explore. For a sane experience in Mastodon, you need to build a feed by hand (no algorithm will do it for you), build filters by hand, and in general you’re far more in control of your experience than you are at places like Echs. I’ll peek into #Explore every so often to find new people to add to my feed (and many more people to block from it!), but other than that I don’t use it. Precisely for the reasons you cite here.
Julia Evans (@bork) writes about her experience of running and using a single-person Mastodon server. The post also links to other people’s experiences in-between.
Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn’t too bad (using docker)… much more straight-forward than I feared.
My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person’s profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven’t posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.
Likewise, my “#explore” tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I’ve recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts… again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.
Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It’s great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.
"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with...
#explore on Mastodon is a good way to find stuff you wouldn’t see on your own feed. (It’s how I found this article.)
And there are various bots that allow you to follow people on Twitter (birdsite.makeup etc). Although my instance has decided they don’t like that so it’s a bit harder to find them than it was.
But yes, I think the article does a good job of articulating the problems. I hope they get solved because there’s a lot I like very much about Mastodon but it does not have the depth and breadth of content (yet). And hashtags do not work well enough as a replacement for search (I followed #BBC to get more news in my feed and ended up with a bit of news and a lot of porn).
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
Can anyone help explain how to find content worth following on Mastodon? I made an account today and despite going through the #explore category I’m finding it difficult to find content or people I want to follow. The few things I’ve found end up just being Lemmy communities which kind of defeats the purpose of having a mastadon account at all… maybe it’s because I never had a Twitter, but the Lemmy/reddit/forum layout makes much more sense to me
Why are trending posts on Mastodon mostly negatively politically oriented? (lemm.ee)
It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?...
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server (jvns.ca)
Julia Evans (@bork) writes about her experience of running and using a single-person Mastodon server. The post also links to other people’s experiences in-between.
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t (erinkissane.com)
"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with...
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.