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by newaccount74 1111 days ago
Mastodon clients are a fun UI playground, lots of indie apps (at least on iOS).

Unfortunately Mastodon feels a bit empty, there's not many people on it yet.

3 comments

It depends on what sort of community you follow. The ML and tech podcasting communities have largely moved over. The politics, journalism and celebrity part of twitter hasn’t moved over. The corollary to that is that much of the vitriol and random toxicity also hasn’t moved over. I have a more vibrant and more interesting mastodon feed than I ever had on twitter. And my twitter feed now is a wasteland, stripped of the good content but still filled with all of the bad content. Twitter is dead man walking as far as I’m concerned.
The problem I experience with Mastodon is it seems like a total echo chamber. Very little interesting conversation most of the time. I still find good links to content there though.
Historically, before the "mass migration" most Mastodon servers were built around a specific community and their shared values of what was appropriate to post. Sure it was federated but many early users tended to stick to "their" server exclusively.

It's no surprise that can end up feeling like an echo chamber. It's getting better than it was when I first started using it about six months ago but some of the posts people catch heat for seem a bit too over the top.

One of my favorite examples was a user who posted a photo of their dinner. It was nothing crazy just like rice, veggies, and chicken. They were immediately accosted for not posting a trigger warning since some people have eating disorders. That's the type of community I have no patience for.

> I have a more vibrant and more interesting mastodon feed than I ever had on twitter.

Exactly! I can comment on a post and have real engagement with someone which hasn't happened in years on Twitter.

Mastodon doesn't have algorithmic recommendations, so you have to follow people fairly liberally to get a good amount of content in your feed.
This exactly. Furthermore, Mastodon rewards those that want to actively participate in communities. It does not reward lurkers who want to passively (doom)scroll.
That's... kind of dumb? What's wrong with lurking if you don't have much to say on a topic, but want to observe?
Makes sense if the goal is to get content flowing. Doesn't make sense if you want the quality of content to be good.
How does that work?

If Alice posted once the last months, and Bob 20 times, and they both post another post, then ... maybe Mastodon will promote Bob's post and demote Alice's because Bob has been more active? (I would have preferred the opposite, hmm)

I mean, according to the joinmastodon.org API stats[0] there are nearly 7 million users and wavering around 9-10k instances (servers).

[0] https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics