Is Mastodon worth it?

[dead-ced-dead]

As a Twitter alternative, is Mastodon all that and a bag of potato chips, or is it a bit rubbish? I'm a bit skeptical of social media services, but some of you lovely peeps may know more about it.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Its no Steve Hoffman forums

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

I have found that it seems like unless you have all your twitter followers on Mastodon, there is very little engagement on it...

[buttgammon]

This probably says more about the people I know than the platform but among the twitter friends I've followed on to Mastodon, there seems to be a painfully dull earnestness.

[touchingcloth]

What are the Steve Hoffman forums that people keep mentioning?

I have found that it seems like unless you have all your twitter followers on Mastodon, there is very little engagement on it...

From what I've read about Mastodon, that's kind of the point. The platform isn't incentivised to monopolise your attention, so it doesn't have algorithms optimised for engagement.

[fortune palace]

I gave it a brief go back in 2017, and at that point the userbase was 95%+ 'furries who make webcomics'

[daf]

What are the Steve Hoffman forums that people keep mentioning?

It's a US based music forum (Hoffman is an engineer). Lots of old music nerds chatting about the latest reissues, dynamic range, Beatles minutiae (eg - they were trying to determine the original speed "Rain" was originally recorded in - by analysing the amp hum on the outtake).

[Bently Sheds]

I signed up to a Mastodon instance in April after the Musk Twitter deal went through. At that point it was extremely quiet, most of the posts on that instance were from LGBTQ+ people escaping the horror of Twitter; furries; artists and a shitload of foreign language stuff.

Now it's a lot more more like Twitter, with gobshites posting politics, people desperately making crap jokes for the (worthless) likes. The LGBTQ+ and furry content has been drowned out by the new arrivals trying to make it Twitter v2.0.

It's still very earnest, pretty friendly and nowhere near as performatively argumentative as Twitter. It's also not as funny as Twitter.

I think of it as being like the internet before your dad, Gaz from down the pub, her from the nail bar and your questionable uncle all got smartphones and signed up to guff their brainwrongs all over the web.

It's still missing that 'vital place to go to for info' thing that Twitter still has; the BBC aren't filling the spaces with "Carol on Mastodon thinks..." and your ISP or bank aren't on there for customer service rantings.

On the plus side, Supertanskii hates it - so that's a bonus.

[Ham Bap]

Tried to use it a month or 2 ago but everything and everyone is split up into different servers (?) and trying to find people to follow is bad.

Just went back to Twitter.

[surreal]

It's not immediately busy for new users as there is no content being pushed at you.  You need to follow some hashtags for your interests and make sure your content has those hashtags as well.  In that way it is much more focused than twitter but doesn't feel as lively or engaging or random.  I'm still on both but using Mastodon more and more.  Also the app you use is quite important as not all of them support the newer features like following hashtags or searching for people across instances

[hamfist]

Just installed a nostr client on iOS to give that a try but it's dead at the moment really.

I logged into Mastodon when a billion other cunts were trying so it was just buggy as fuck trying to even get a seasion.

Still twitter for me really despite it being run by and infested by fucking cunts. There are at least some bits of it which bring me enjoyment regularly and I like it as a vent outlet for pointless observations which if I said them to real humans they'd think me odd.

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

It's not immediately busy for new users as there is no content being pushed at you.  You need to follow some hashtags for your interests and make sure your content has those hashtags as well.  In that way it is much more focused than twitter but doesn't feel as lively or engaging or random.  I'm still on both but using Mastodon more and more.  Also the app you use is quite important as not all of them support the newer features like following hashtags or searching for people across instances

Think that would explain why I've not really got much out of it - on Twitter I had multiple accounts for various purposes - but I reckon to get any traction on Mastodon, I'll have to focus on one handle and following hashtags!