On the iOS app, is there a way to see a “trending feed” or something that that lets me see beyond who I’ve followed? I followed like one or two people and it feels like my feed now only ever shows stuff from them now.
Maybe I just like the Lemmy/reddit style of social media better. It makes more sense to my brain.
My favorite part about the fediverse is that you get to explore social media without feeling pressured, manipulated or like you have to do a lengthy sign up process. It encourages you to try different mediums of social media and find one that vibes with you.
Mastodon is more like a garden than a grocery store. If you spend the time to slowly build your network by following interesting people and hashtags, Mastodon can be an amazing experience where you actually have real human interactions.
It's not good for viral marketing or mass produced content in my opinion, but if you start by following a few people that boost a lot of other posts, then you'll find content in time. Every time you see an interesting post, follow that person. If it later turns out that it's not for you you can unfollow it and it's not a big deal.
I don't have iOS but you can see trending hashtags on the web so maybe there's an equivalent on the app? You could also see all the latest post from you server and the entire Mastodon.
The best way to diversify the timeline for me is to directly follow tags of things you like.
I don't use the official app. However if you would like to try out Ice Cubes that would be another fully open-source and free as in beer and speech app which has trending hashtags, trending posts, and suggested users in it's search tab.
The algorithms it uses are pretty simple and fully auditable. I think it's mostly just tags with the most posts in the 24 hours etc. Discovering important news like back in the days on Twitter works the same with this feature.
I use Megalodon as my Mastodon client and Sync as my Lemmy client right now. Does anybody know of any clients which work for both Lemmy and Mastodon at the same time on Android?
My mind went the same direction as you at first, now I'm wondering if OP is saying that they try to suggest Mastodon as a better place to friends, because the are complaining.
Nope, i tried to join years ago and apart from being awful to navigate, in just 5 minutes I was considered a desinformation propagandist by asking for sources validating the supposed "facts".
The amount of mental gymnastics to pretend that federated and central content models are somehow different content is insane.
The people that used reddit and twitter before lemmy and mastodon is like 1:1.
The change is in the freedom not in the users. There's less content even on our platforms. We need to find ways to make Lemmy and mastodon a better product experience than closed source central software to continue to see new faces. Right now Lemmy esp feels like it's mostly just nerds who understand the tech.
Some ideas I have are more like news bots and things that are harder to do with closed APIs.
Or we can just enjoy mastodon and Lemmy for what it is worth. You don't want it to become mainstream, you just want things to be more federated in general.
How did email and RSS (podcasts) become so derederated but nothing else?
Yeah I can see an element of that being true. I wouldn't mind just enjoying it for what it's worth.
I think though that the mainstream being able to speak what they think without a reddit bot saying "pictures are not allowed on /pics because it's not a hyperlink and 84 characters long is not allowed" has value.
In other words just unrestricted free speech for the more reasonable part (no threats). But on the other end once it's picked up by mainstream it probably is ruined by pumping of ads somehow.
There are literally published studies that show Twitter has tweaked the algorithm to promote the most vile and extremist right wing media while at the same time cooling the spread of moderate voices.
Anyone still hanging out at the bar run by Nazis and full of Nazis and funding Nazis is either deluded in thinking that they can change the vibe of the party, or they just plain like the vibe.