As far as I know, one of the headline features of microblogging networks is searching and following hashtags. On top of that, Mastodon (like Lemmy) tells users that it’s not important what server/instance you join, because of federation.
With Lemmy, I find it easy to search and interact with communities across all the federated instances. Chances are, people on my local instance (even if it’s relatively small) will have already interacted with popular communities for a given topic, so they will be easy to discover. However with Mastodon this concept seems totally broken – when I search a hashtag I want to see everything, and related posts might be spread out over hundreds of small servers for which, apparently, my small server has no content populated. With Lemmy, I understand that content gets populated on my local instance when somebody else on my instance has interacted with it before. I just don’t understand how this approach is feasible with for a system like Mastodon. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server?
What you need to do, is engage with people so that you’re getting federated content from the instances they are on. It takes time, my strategy was to follow anyone I thought was remotely interesting, and then unfollow people I end up not caring much for until I had a nice curated, populated timeline. It definitely helps to not be on a tiny instance, but it’s not necessary to be on big ones like mastodon.social.
I completely agree with you. I want to use Mastodon by the barrier to entry and use is just so high. I find myself closing the app as soon as I open it.
RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server
Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in
There’s a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:
https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
https://bigrelay.social/inboxIn the Administration section, there’s a Relay page where you can put these in.
For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn’t enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.
For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/
Hope this helps
Thanks. To clarify, my server would have to do this? I don’t run my own server, I just joined a fairly small one (I didn’t know it would matter).
This reflects my experience too. After a while, I managed to find interesting people to follow who sometimes “retweet” (forgot the Mastodon name for that) other interesting people which I can in turn follow. I now have a slow feed of varying quality and I barely visit it since joining Lemmy. Mastodon looks great if you join the same server with a large group of friends, follow eachother and use it like a group chat, but, like you, I have found it really difficult to set up an interesting feed for myself.
I think retweeting is called boosting.
