Technology

Probably still bots, I'm the only real person on the internet

Cats. Mastodon has a lot of cats. It's great.

I follow hashtags on Mastodon sort of like how I follow communities on Lemmy, but instead of "content" I get quick thoughts from people. It's different but, as someone who also didn't use Twitter, it's nice to have a space where the barrier to engagement is a bit lower; you need a thought, not a link or discussion, and sometimes that's enough to prompt engagement.

What kind of content are you guys getting from there?

For me it's probably best described as "background chatter", so mostly a bunch of different news sites that aren't important enough for me to go into my RSS feed, bots posting notifications, and random thoughts from bloggers.

Any stuff like that to help onboarding Mastodon?

There are those that help you to stay on your home instance as well, but the big one for me is StreetPass for Mastodon, which finds and collects Mastodon accounts as you browse the web. That way you can organically build your network without much effort. You'd be surprised how many accounts from news sites, open source projects and people with blogs you can find that way.

For what it's worth, here's an account that reposts everything NASA puts out: https://social.beachcom.org/@nasa

link for reference https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher

I was for a long time unable to understand the appeal of the structure of Twitter/Mastodon.

Recently I have become an active Mastodon reader (reader; I have made no public posts). I realize now that it is basically an RSS reader: you follow sources (people/organizations) you are interested in and get to read those in reverse-chronological order. If you aren't an organization, celebrity, journalist, activist, politician or otherwise someone whose thoughts people in the outside world would care about, then there is no real point in ever posting anything there; people will not read it anyway because they aren't following you. This is unlike the discussion-forum structure of Reddit/Lemmy where ordinary people are meant to participate.

Universal link switcher? What is that

What other stuff am i missing from the lemmy experience

For me, it's mostly to connect with autiste. It's great and people are mostly nice.

The keys are hashtags and groups. You need to follow both to create your algorithm.

What kind of content are you guys getting from there?

I don't go on there a lot, but...it's micro-blogging. People post their opinions, projects they're working on, pictures of their cat, etc. Blog stuff.

Hey, thanks a lot everyone! Got something to start up this week :-)

thanks for telling me about universal link switcher

It's shown itself with the latest kerfuffle.. the discussions (apart from the occasional nutter) haven't devolved into people calling each other nazis yet. In fact some have been positively educational.

The internet was a lot better 20 years ago because it was so split up and not as many people knew how to use it

The problem with Fediverse is that it removes the isolation and the lack of separate accounts makes removing yourself impossible

According to this the artist is Dopatwo

Pretty sure your instance is defederated from a couple notable ones, so, yes :)

That's what hexbear used to be.

Instance is like ISP. It's an important part of the infrastructure, and in principle it does matter, but for 90% of cases it doesn't make much difference.

Unpopular opinion I know. But lots of people who would love Mastodon never sign up because there is such unreasonable emphasis on choosing an instance. Just pick a large stable one, then you can switch if you want later once you get to know the platform.