I’m not actually using twitter, just never got into it, but now that I’m trying out mastodon, idk if I’m just too old now but I don’t… get it. I just can’t seem to engage with anyone, the UI seems confusing and counterintuitive, I don’t seem to have the context to get into this type of website, can someone tell me how I do this?
I always tell people that mastodon is more like a garden than a grocery store.
It will not automatically start serving you any content because there is no algorithm.
If you want to begin to cultivate your feed, you should search for topics that interest you, especially using the hashtags. Post an introduction with hashtags (there are guides for doing this online). Then start following everyone who posts something interesting. If you find out later that they are not posting the type of material you are interested in then you can always unfollow in there no hard feelings. You can also follow or mute individual hashtags.
Most importantly, Mastodon is actually a social network. Reply to the people you follow, like and boost, boost, boost! Plan to be a participant in the conversation.
also remember just like how lemmy has it’s kbin, mastodon has it’s interoperable alternatives.
i bet a fair bit of the complaints i hear from people on lemmy (low character count, wanting to follow topics instead of people) would be solved by trying out a misskey fork such as firefish, iceshrimp or sharkey.
i don’t think there’s any instance out there with a char count lower than 1000, and antennas are really good (why limit youself to following a single hashtag when you can follow any number of arbitrary keywords?) if you’re in a well federated instance (provided you’re ok with them not feeding into your home feed and them not being retroactive (so after you set up an antenna you’ll need to wait for new posts to filter in))
they aren’t as polished as mastodon since mastodon kinda ate everyone’s lunch in terms of developer attention (and upstream misskey is an almost one-man-show mess developed entirely in japanese which is why everyone prefers to fork instead of collaborating), but they’ve been getting really good.
just avoid flagship instances (> 1k active users) for the time being. scaling is still something not many of them have solved just yet