How does Mastodon work?

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 75 points – 12 months ago

So recently learnt about Mastodon, thought I will just try it!

However, I have never used Twitter (ahem, sorry. “X”). I don’t really understand how it all works.

I have followed a few communities/people but all I see is single chat-messages with no replies beneath it and couldn’t really see about what it is unless it’s specific said in the sentence.

Could someone try to explain it a bit, a shorty summary or redirect me to somewhere it is already explained?

Note: I’m using Mammoth app for iOS, for Mastodon.

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Mastodon is your personal soapbox where you can shout your thoughts.

However before you have followers, you're kinda shouting into the void.

However hashtags are like little campfires and if you go to one. You'll see people. If you share your thoughts around the campfire, people will see you.

Now once you've met people (and followed them), you can see them from atop your soapbox, no need to stand around the fire. Though in some cases, you won't know what they said before you became friends.

The more campfires you find (and follow) along with people, the busier your home feed is and the more interesting and/or fun your experience will be.

@sabreW4K3 @ModernRisk in addition, you can re-shout into the void things other people shout into the void to kind of make the echo heard a bit more to your followers, if you have them.

Good explanation. I've been on birdsite a while and struggled to get into Mastodon because of the lack of an algorithm and not knowing you could follow hashtags.

I just wish the artists I follow on Xsite would move to Mastodon instead of Threads and Bluesky.

It’s a never ending battle to get people to quit using bad media. Never. Ending.

Yeah, the nice thing about Lemmy and kbin is that enough people left Reddit that this can work, since Reddit had a more technically savvy userbase.

Unfortunately, there is also a group that left for Squabbles, and while I do like Squabbles so far, I am mindful of the fact that the owner would like to monetize it someday. There have already been rumors of charging for API access and other questionable things.

The thing is though, you'll feel more of a resonance with the artists you follow that do move over. It's just a matter of patience.

Well, one of the artists who did is actually one of my best friends (arsbin@mastodon.art), but my other best friend seems to want to stay on the former birdsite 😂

Give them FOMO. At this point, the only people that are staying there are corporate shills and people with no vision. Remember when hipsters used to claim to have known about something years before everyone else and everyone else was like, they literally made the song two days live on a YouTube stream. Well tell your friend to come and be a hipster!

This is a terrible advert for mastodon 😭