What is it like for people who are migrating to the fedi today ?
Are there still tools that help link old accounts and find followers?
I'm helping a friend move over, and it occurs to me that if the "find followers" tools are mostly hard to use or broken it might be very hard to get ensconced.
If you have a decent sized account here I think it helps to introduce new people, if you know them and have some overlap with their social circle.
I moved here from Reddit rather than the birdsite, so my experiences may not be quite what you're looking for, but I started out with an introduction and hashtags.
I followed a few hashtags, and then followed some of the Fedifolk using those regularly.
Then, I started visiting the feeds of boosted Fedifolk.
It's taken a wee while to get a feed that I love browsing, but I don't mind that. I love this self-curation thing.
@futurebird Now that we have opt-in search, it should be easier to search for people by name or Twitter handle and find results than when the previous big migrations happened. But Elon broke some of the old tools.
@naught101@futurebird All my migrant re-follows had to be done manually. And most of them that weren't @beige.party gagposters have moved on elsewhere or quit social media altogether. So I steel myself and drink from the "Federated" firehose to follow anyone that may deserve it. And also see all the stuff that isn't a regular part of my schtick/milieu/theme.
You should follow at least 300 people or this place is "dead" WHO those people are determines if it will be "fun" ... but it's easy to unfollow people and no one is offended if you do so I'd say follow liberally...
Also write an intro post and put hash tags in it. What you see here is based on who you follow and the tags you follow. You have more control... but that means you need to say what you want to see.
@futurebird@naught101 thanks for the advice! I'll have to get on here more often and make some more posts. I've gotta figure out how to follow hashtags that interest me too.
To follow a hash tag you can click on it and there should be a button to follow ... if you don't see a tag you need you can use it in a post, then click on it.
@futurebird@cjb you can also just search for the hashtag and follow it directly from there.
I'd say 300 is a bare minimum to follow. I reckon it started being good around 1000. Lots of people will follow you back if your bio looks interesting too.
@futurebird@cjb@naught101 Can confirm.
I treat social media a little like “talking to myself”* so I don’t I don’t worry about getting a lot of “likes” and “reposts” but you definitely have to get a fair number of followers before you get a lot of responses.
In addition to @futurebird suggestion of an intro, use pinned posts to tell folks a little about you. (I overuse them, I know 😂)
*ironically, this is how I posted on Twitter back in ‘07.
@futurebird@cjb@naught101 I think I actually prefer less activity than that--I follow fewer than 200 people. I think a level of activity that most social-media users would regard as "dead" is what I'm comfortable with.
Also, I'm more likely than I used to to unfollow people even if I think they are basically decent and right, if what they're posting is hurting my brain right now. (Especially if a lot of that is reposts from people I wouldn't want to follow.) I'm starting to think this is crucial for mental health.
@futurebird Oh and for your friend.
Definitely have them try out a couple of the alternative web interfaces, like https://phanpy.social or https://elk.zone or of course any of the Bajillion 3rd party phone apps. (For discovery, I like Mammoth on iOS)
@futurebird if the migration is from Twitter I'm afraid Musk messing with the API must have broken the tools, so yeah, it's very possible that they're all broken :(
@futurebird most people are interested in topics so I'd start with following hashtags of their interests through which they can discover interesting people to follow.
@futurebird
Oh my, I’ve never thought how my own migration. I think I watched the sneetches…first experience meeting people on the fediverse lol .
I encourage people to use mastodon it’s like a wonderland of webrings.
It’s its own little multiverse.
Also somewhat like an information filter.
I guess it all depends on how ppl use it. I wonder what everyone’s preference is?
I agree about stewarding friends!
@futurebird hard agree on the hashtags. a good intro post (pinned and tagged as "introduction") with all the tags your friend is interested in can do a lot, as well. plus, being open to following back.
your feed fills up faster than you think, so knowing that you can make Lists and put follows into different categories (news, tech, art, etc) or Mute people for varying lengths of time will make the overwhelm of a new platform easier.
that's my technical advice; this is my mental advice (feel free to ignore lol):
i don't think mastodon is a one-to-one switch from Twitter/Twitter-clone like a lot ppl think; and, they're not going to find all of the ppl they used to follow on here either. better to accept that than have false pretenses.
like, even if you find someone you know, you might not reach them because of the instance you're on blocking theirs or something. it's not one huge pot of Users split into different Areas ("the [insert trait/interest] part of Mastodon) that you can pull from. and it's not going to ever be. not designed that way.
Mastodon is a technology more than platform, so it has all the benefits and miseries of trying to join social groups and gatherings irl. all the personal politics that comes with that.
instead, your friend should consider how they interacted with their follows/mutuals. whether those are genuine connections they want to maintain or interactions they can recreate with other folx with similar thoughts and posting habits.
@futurebird@gombang most of the tools seem to be broken. If you had somewhat tight networks elsewhere a method that’s time consuming but can work is to locate one of the people you used to follow elsewhere and look at who they are following to find more of your people