Building up a good list of follows on Mastodon is orders of magnitude harder than on Bluesky unfortunately. They need to address this if they want adoption.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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I dunno. I joined Mastodon back in 2022 and just...followed people.
They weren't the same people as on Twitter, but it didn't really matter in the end. I now follow almost 600 people and never feel like my feed is empty.
One social media site doesn't have to be better than another, it just has to be sufficient for your needs.
That takes a long time. I tried the same on Mastodon and ended up losing interest. I went to bluesky and just followed some starter packs and was up and running in less than an hour with 1000+ follows and a nice feed. Within a few weeks I had more than 700 followers myself.
Any good things to follow on Mastodon? I've tried using it, but between BlueSky and Lemmy, it doesn't seem to have as many users. No biggie, just asking. Cheers!
I use mastodon to read about what scientists and environmentalists are writing. So not really for social, more like science based post viewing
What are your top recommendations, my friend? I'm big on that, I like the social aspects if sites in a sense, but I prefer having a grouped area for my news.
While politics are important to stay up to date on, I'm trying to fix mt feeds to have as minimal political news as possible, unless I click on it.
I've been using inoreader, but haven't quite figured it out either. I'd like to follow scientists and environmentalists like you mentioned, but also artists, designers, small businesses, etc.
I'm trying to stay up to date in my relevant fields, but also find people to donate my time to. I've heard mastodon is great for networking, but to be honest, everyone on lemmy has been bad ass. This is becoming my new hub, does lemmy connect into mastodon fediverse thingy? Lol!
Mastodon actually has way more users than Lemmy but you need to follow each person indivdually instead of just following a community, which is probably why it feels more empty
Its why I could never get down with the twitterverse. Seems like the people magazine of the internet. Im not interested in people, im interested in specific subjects and ideas. Maybe im missing something.
You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. So if you want music recommendations you can follow #NowPlaying, (for example) and every time someone uses that tag it'll appear in your timeline as if you follow that person. It's nice for follow discovery too, because if the same people keep posting links to tunes you dig, then it's a fair bet that you'll have similar interests.
I've not tried it myself, but I guess that in theory, you could follow a bunch of hashtags without ever following an actual account.
Thank you. So this is the trick. Ima set up a mastodon account.
Never seen it described as magazine like but you are 100% right. As a game dev I enjoy twitter-likes for this exact reason. Its very easy to find specific people you want to work with (ie artists, musicians, etc.) and network with them. Its also easier to market and share your game due to the 'magazine' like and fast paced nature of these platforms. However I do think twitter-likes suck if you aren't using it for specific cases like this.
I mean, if you follow the right people you'll get exposed to the right ideas. Most of the people I follow will not be posting about their kids or their brunch, but about cool articles or things they learned. Or am I missing something?
I want to throw in a second good word for hashtags. I follow a tiny handful of people, almost entirely personal friends. But I follow a lot of hashtags. Because it typically is the content that I'm after as opposed to a particular person. If my favorite poster of weather information decides to post something about accounting, I don't really want to see that. Also following a hashtag gets you a lot more exposure to like-minded people than you would if you were trying to follow them all individually, and you see a lot more posts about things you enjoy.
I wish mastodon made tags as easy as Tumblr did. I hate that they clutter up the post and that there's no autocomplete.
Would you say there's a good amount of hashtags and what not for the creative type? I'm trying to find ways to network with people in my industry a little better. Cheers mate
Yes!! I follow a ton of art and craft hashtags. My mastodon is popping, you just have to do some work.
I'm following 42 hashtags, a bunch of science, teaching, and programming stuff, mostly (I'm a CS instructor). But also things like #trains. :) And the state and city I live in.
I use Mastodon to follow people and Lemmy to follow topics.
I actually created a Proof of concept where each hashtag would be a subreddit like interface a couple of weeks ago. Its VERY rough but links2 compatible :D. The idea is the first hashtag will be the "lemmy community" like interface. Its just mastodon.py with a very small fast api front end. Popped it up in an hour or so. I need to work on the UI badly but I keep not having the spoons.
Any way I can help you with your goals? No charge of course. I'd like to see more free options available for people, my time is worth the sacrifice to help give power back to the people.
I threw it up on Codeberg. Ill add in instructions later mastodon-to-hash-as-mblog. Feel free to fork and add what you want. Ill add in a README in a bit.
One thing to note, you HAVE to create an API token from the mastodon server of your choice in order to make this work. Theres probably a way around this, but I havent found it yet.
I follow a couple people like Hempuli (Baba Is You dev), Internetarchive, and David Revoy (Pepper & Carrot comic creator). Really depends on what you wanna follow. I follow them because I'm interested in their work in one way or another.
It's definitely work in progress. But it has also grown a lot, and you will have no issues finding good content there. Hashtags and "people that the people you follow follow" are a good start. Also, at the end of my post you'll find some seed suggestions. :)
Right on! Thanks for the genuinely helpful response, I've been trying to expand my presence on that app as well. Cheers mate!
Any time! What's your handle, I can follow you. :)
It's StepBacon, I believe haha, I'll give you a followback!