Picking your first Mastodon instance to join can feel like a big deal - there's so many different options. Here's the good news - it's easier than you'd think.
Half of the “utility” comes from following people and hashtags that interest you. From there, use boosts and such to follow the people that continue to be fun to read. I haven’t gotten bored with my feed since taking a more active approach to choosing what I see.
I’ve initially followed hashtags and then my feed was filled with absolute crap since everyone tags even irrelevant things all the time, not to mention posts in other languages (but not marked as such so they don’t get filtered). Like following gaming, steam, linux is just asking for trouble, but even if you follow something smaller you don’t get stuff about the game - you get stuff about people that like that game. Following steamdeck just filled my feed with people complaining about it or saying how its collecting dust for them.
Then I started following people instead and as few hashtags as possible. Now my feed is 40% them talking about their pets, kids, tech stacks or daily representation issues or anxiety, 30% is rants about social networks and fediverse, 20% actual tech news and 10% is sometimes actual interesting new content or pictures.
Maybe its a learning curve, maybe I just have different expectations since whenever I bring it up people just respond “it is its own thing, not twitter”. It’s not bad, but it’s not really what I want either.
Half of the “utility” comes from following people and hashtags that interest you. From there, use boosts and such to follow the people that continue to be fun to read. I haven’t gotten bored with my feed since taking a more active approach to choosing what I see.
I’ve initially followed hashtags and then my feed was filled with absolute crap since everyone tags even irrelevant things all the time, not to mention posts in other languages (but not marked as such so they don’t get filtered). Like following gaming, steam, linux is just asking for trouble, but even if you follow something smaller you don’t get stuff about the game - you get stuff about people that like that game. Following steamdeck just filled my feed with people complaining about it or saying how its collecting dust for them.
Then I started following people instead and as few hashtags as possible. Now my feed is 40% them talking about their pets, kids, tech stacks or daily representation issues or anxiety, 30% is rants about social networks and fediverse, 20% actual tech news and 10% is sometimes actual interesting new content or pictures.
Maybe its a learning curve, maybe I just have different expectations since whenever I bring it up people just respond “it is its own thing, not twitter”. It’s not bad, but it’s not really what I want either.