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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I've heard of Mastadon, even tried it but couldn't get any value of the contents on it. The last time I looked at it, most of the content was about Mastadon and welcome messages. I was expecting to see some crazy stuff like flat earthers or antivaxxers but even that was not available.

I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.

Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.

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> I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.

You needed to find people to follow. Unlike corporate social media content is not pushed to you by algorithms. You have to build your own social network manually. Not doing so you have an empty personal timeline, and a too busy global timeline that is full of irrelevant stuff to you.

> Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.

Strange as it may sound on HN, but I am happy it is that way. There is a different culture now on the fediverse, and it is one that likely won't survive that 'crazy growth'.

That doesn't make sense though unless there's a directory of recommendation engine or search engine for interesting people. Otherwise it means that I'm supposed to follow people that I already know, which is ridiculous because I don't want yet another channel to see the same stuff I already see.

On HN there's the front page where interesting stuff is curated algorithmically and smart people that I don't follow or know perviously make interesting comments on that stuff. Mastadon doesn't seem to offer anything like that.

I think the trick is to find an instance where the people mostly share your interests. When I first tried mastodon.social, I didn't get anywhere. But when I found a more niche instance, I was able to find a lot of good content on the local timeline, which gave me people to follow and gradually exposed me to the larger fediverse.

Where do you find this content? Can you link a few examples of good content(in your opinion, of course)?

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