Since I’ve been on Lemmy, I don’t know what my use is for Mastodon anymore. It’s dead on there anyway. I don’t have anyone to talk to and nobody responds to my posts.
You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you’ll get likes and boosts.
And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it’s quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.
Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.
“Creating your feed” is an essential part of of enjoying mastodon. Hashtags are the single biggest thing but also
- groups help surface new material
- you can follow lemmy/kbin users (you can also follow communities but you only see boosts)
- you can subscribe to peertube creators
- you can follow pixelfed users if you want more pictures in your feed
- etc
I don’t think it’s a Mastodon problem. It’s a generalist social network problem. Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, why are we using those? For some, it’s “to keep in touch” with friends and family, and they’re happy seeing any activity, preferably things that makes them smile (that’s more Facebook). For others, it’s a mean to build street cred in their industry by publicly saying on topic things that sound smart (that was Twitter). But if you look for interesting discussions on things you like, in order to learn something, they’re terrible at that. It’s where specialized communities, discussing only one topic, shine. It used to be forums, then reddit, now lemmy. RSS is also a very good way to get that kick.
