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Because of the federated nature of mastodon, experience on one instance might be quite different than another. If the instances that are not "barren wasteland"
by aqsalose 9y ago
Because of the federated nature of mastodon, experience on one instance might be quite different than another.
If the instances that are not "barren wasteland" are difficult to find, it's a problem.
- yogthos 9y agoFinding instances is very easy because there's a registry and a helpful wizard linked off the main site https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started You can specify what the minimum number of users you want on an instance, what topics you care about, and so on. I actually think this is superior to Twitter model, because you can find an instance that fits your interests closely and not have to deal with the noise you don't care about.
- glenstein 9y agoRight. Fortunately, the offshoot instances are easy to find. But even if they weren't, the extremely active main instances are enough to show the platform isn't a barren wasteland. And the difficulty of finding offshoot instances with lower amounts of participation is a different category of problem, however real, from the platform itself not having people.
- aqsalose 9y agoSemi-related: is there any easy way to follow local timelines of multiple instances with a single client? My current main instance has only handful of active people, so I've been wondering if I should look at somewhere else. However, I'd rather not leave my current instance altogether; on the other hand, registering n accounts on n instances and then opening n web browser clients to "see it all" seems like an unnecessary hassle.
- yogthos 9y agoI think the easiest way to get views into other instances is to follow people from there. You'll start getting whatever they boost in your feed that way. Being able to follow timelines from other instances would be handy though.