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.

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.

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
    32·
    1 year ago

    This is probably a stupid question, but for those of you that use Mastodon — how did you find people to follow?

    I tried it out a few months ago but I didn’t like the few accounts they recommended, and searching for users or keywords didn’t get me too far either…

    • moitoi@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 year ago

      You need to follow hashtags but primary groups. You will find groups boosting toots about your topics. It’s the first accounts to follow then you will find others.

      It’s not that hard. People have to keep in mind, it’s not Twitter and so it works differently.

    • FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      It helps if you can find a half-dozen people involved in something you like to follow at the start. Other than that, try joining a mid-sized (~1,000-3,000 users) Mastodon server based around a hobby, interest, or social group you’re a part of. Most Mastodon clients allow you to keep a column open for the people you follow as well as the people on the “Local Timeline” who are a part of your server.

      It’s a new social network. If you see someone pop up who’s made a pithy post or two, give 'em a follow. If they’re not working out a week later, un-follow them. Don’t feel afraid to follow a ton of people when you first get started to liven up your feed until you find a good circle of folks.

    • mookulator@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      That’s kind of the problem I think. I was able to find like 2 people there I want to follow. Lemmy is going to be far more successful at displacing its alternative because all the communities you’d want to subscribe to are here.

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      I joined up before you could subscribe to hashtags, so my approach was:

      1. Read my local instance feed and click on content that interested me.
      2. Checked the users that made the interesting content to see if they had more.
      3. If they did, followed.

      Nowadays I would add this step:

      1. Subscribe to hashtags on topics I’m interested in and follow people who regularly contribute good material to them.