Mastodon mindlessly copies big "horizontal" social network services, but they rely on algorithms a lot. Without algorithms, I think that platforms with categories and communities are better. That's why before the major social networks, forums were quite popular for discussions.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 29 points 1 month ago

I had a bit of a slow start on Mastodon, but after sticking with it for a while it's now by far the best social media experience I've ever had. I follow less than 200 people, not all of them active, but their posts along with the content they boost provides a much more interesting feed for me than any algorithm ever has.

And when I post something I've put work into, it's boosted by those interested and reaches far more relevant people than I've ever reached on other networks. And people trust it to be interesting because it's boosted by someone they trust, rather than some faceless algorithm.

That said, the cost of entry is indeed a bit high.

[–] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is why I like Bluesky more. The ability to create your own feed or follow feeds created by others makes it much easier to find content you want to see and even enables you to create something like a community by creating a feed that only aggregates posts that contains a certain hashtag or any other symbol or word or emoji.

[–] Quicky@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

You can follow hashtags in Mastodon tbf