I’m pretty new to the whole Lemmy thing, but I figured I’d ask peoples’ opinions on whether it’s worth it to get into Mastodon too now that I’m officially a member of the Fediverse.
Is it active? Is it worth it? Have you had good experiences there?
Mastodon has been active for years, and since the twitter implosion, it is just as lively there as twitter ever was. Just more polite. I got the impression that we left all the trolls back on the birdsite, so mastodon is much nicer in tone.
There are several sites that can help you find your twitter-friends on mastodon based on if they have their username in their profile. Also, make new friends from across the fediverse!There are a number of companies, newspapers, clubs, government agencies from different countries already on there, and also active. (I mostly know of the german ones, where even regional government hopped on there. They’re even running their own instance.)
There are about a million instances now, so I’d recommend joining not a big one, but one that is thematically close to you. You will still be able to reach all (most) of the others, but the local timeline will be interesting. :)
Mastodon is substantially more active than Lemmy thus far. It’s a different type of medium to Lemmy, so what you want to use is up to you.
Personally I use both, but just like I was spending much more time on reddit than twitter, I’d like to spend more time on Lemmy than Mastodon. I have also found Lemmy a little more intuitive to use initially, so it might be worth spending a couple weeks getting used to how the fediverse works before jumping into Mastodon.
Mastodon is very active after you start following enough people and hashtags to populate your feed. It’s a bit rough to get started though: no algorithm means no content (or very random content in the local/federated feeds) until you build it up for yourself. But once you hit critical mass, I’ve found it a much nicer experience than I ever got on Twitter.
I run into the issue of people randomly using hashtags. For example, I follow #reddit, but then all I see is porn. And if I search for, say, MKBHD, then I see at least two dozen of them. Some are “legit” retweeting bots, others are just impersonators. I’ve been trying to use Mastodon since a couple months back but I never really got into it. We need more persons of significance and media outlets to join. I am disappointed that, after NPR quit twitter, they don’t have at least some kind of presence on Mastodon.
That was my experience too, following widely used hashtags just results in a mess of people tagging everything personal with them, in foreign languages, or sometimes even irrelevant things just to get clicks. And all this content is treated equally when it comes to populating my home page. I’ve had some luck following individuals but that’s also just random chance who you find. It really needs the bigger content creators and personalities there in order to take off as twitter replacement so there’s some consistency and quality.
The handful of people that I still want to follow on Twitter, I follow on Mastodon via one of the many mirror instances. I’ve been using bird.makeup.
Yeah, you do get to reply to them but at least it’s a way to mitigate the initial lack of content. Extra points if you unfollow the celebrities on Twitter and tell them you’d rather follow them on Mastodon.
I find it very active, once you follow a few active accounts. People boost interesting stuff into your timeline, you can follow hashtags directly, and on smaller thematic instances the local timeline is a great place too, so there is plenty of ways to get a nice active feed.
I’ve just started using both and find them to be complimentary.
Mastodon is great, especially if you use a well made app to browse it, like Ice Cubes, Ivory or Mona.
I love mastodon!
Mastodon is good if you’re after following specific people, rather than just general topics.
I’ve bounced off Twitter and then Mastodon several times because my use for social media is more for link aggregation and discussion, and I don’t really necessarily care about who I’m having a discussion with, but rather that there’s a good discussion about an interesting topic going on.
I know hashtags are a thing and you can follow them, but I’ve kinda found them hard to deal with on Mastodon because everyone puts a giant pile of hashtags on everything so you end up following certain tags and like, maybe 1/3rd of the things that show up in the feed are actually really related to everything that was tagged.
I do run an instance and find it’s useful for certain things, but I very much prefer the Lemmy approach to content.
I know you’re specifically asking about Mastodon but consider checking it firefish as well. It’s got a lot of quality of life features that Mastodon still does not. That said the app situation is a lot rougher. Most Mastodon apps do work with firefish but every now and again something seems to break. If you’re looking for an instance firefish.lgbt is pretty solid but a little on the small side. Of course everything federates so that should be a huge issue unless you’re really into local.
I have an epic experience there
It’s nice and very active, but you might want to look up a tutorial or something, because the UI isn’t very intuitive for new users (it’s good once you know how it works though)
I really like Mastodon, so much so that I have several accounts for different purposes. You do need to invest a bit of time into following a good number of people who post stuff you like, though. I was pretty active on Twitter and now I’m pretty active on Mastodon and I like Mastodon better, but I had to spend a little time searching hashtags for people posting cool stuff.
One thing that I haven’t seen anyone mention is moderation - your experience will be better with a well-moderated, well-run server, otherwise you’ll have issues with spam and maybe worse. Generally a medium-sized server based around a subject of interest or a geographic location works well, where the admins are actively involved in the community.
I love mastadon and highly recommend it! I’ve had nothing but a great experience thus far
It definitely is worth it. In terms of the number of users, it certainly cannot be compared with Twitter. Measured in terms of interaction, meaningful exchange and a nice community, it is worlds better than Twitter.
There are topic-oriented instances, e.g. for cybersecurity (https://infosec.exchange/). But of course you can follow people from other instances through the federation. The advantage of topic-oriented instances is that you have a local timeline on which all posts of your instance appear.
I love Mastodon, I was an admin for years and now am a user on another instance and both have been very positive experiences!
