I started to really build my following on Mastodon when Twitter fired their accessibility team, which was the same time as all the other Twitter disasters that drove people away. However, I had it really easy: I’m blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people’s followers and shout about my username and instance, and everything came together. I have people who have expressed interest in joining but who are not blind or part of any other specific community like that; they just want to check it out. I’m not really sure what that’s like, and not sure what to recommend to them either. Are there some hashtag lists anywhere so people can find posts/users that align with whatever they might be interested in? How do “normal people” find their people?
For one, I’ve found following Feditips to be very useful; they give a lot of good advice on how to use the Fediverse and find other people. They are a bit Mastodon-specific – which is fine if you’re actually using Mastodon, of course – but a lot of their advice applies to other Fediverse instances like Firefish or Akkoma, too.
The general advice I’d give is:
- Use hashtags! Put hashtags in any post you want other people to be able to find, and find out what hashtags are popular for whatever kind of content you like, then search for them regularly.
- Many people start by making an account on mastodon.social first because they’re the largest instance, but it’s easier to find people with similar interests if you join an instance focused around that; then, you can look at the local timeline to find people talking about things you like.
- If you know a lot of people on Twitter, you can use Fedifinder to try to find any of them who have Fediverse accounts.
Laurens Hof posted a roundup of algorithmic Mastodon clients that can highlight interesting stuff from a server’s federated feed:
Using those is a good way to find interesting stuff and people to follow.
Hashtags can help, but honestly I think the only way to start is to interact with people. Having your bio filled out and starting to chat with people in local goes a long way, and other users will help steer you to new content at least as well as hashtags.
Think of it as hanging out at a new pub.
I’m blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people’s followers
Sorry, I know this is stupid, but I found this sentence really funny 😳
Coming to your question, there are already a lot of valid suggestions, what I want to add is: it can take a bit of time, tell your friends to not immediately give up. It takes time because there is less people, so somewhat less interesting stuff. It takes time because there is no algorithm suggesting what you should follow. But if they can start with a small amount of interesting accounts, they will find that their boost will probably be from other interesting accounts that they can then follow, until the timeline becomes interesting. Just be patient :-)
The funny part is that I almost always manage to write “look”, “see” or similar on posts that actively mention I’m blind. I’m glad people get a chuckle out of it, but it’s so commonplace that I can’t imagine changing it. When 99% of people talk a certain way, the 1% will follow. And thanks for the tip. I do think patience is key, and some people probably give up because we’re conditioned not to have patience on social media.
Moreover, in English “to look” has a meaning that may be somehow similar to “search” or “go through”, while in Italian this is not true, you would use a different verb, so it could be evn more on my side than yours.
Coming to your question, I want to add that the advantage is that, by being patient, my timeline in mastodon is now well crafted, informative, enjoyable and effective, in contrast to what I got on traditional socials where I tend to scroll indefinitely with my brain turned off. What I mean is that it pays off