This is already my second move to Mastodon. The first time I did not see any appeal. There were just a few nerds interacting with other nerds. Nothing special. I did not publish much. I just watched a bit and was bored pretty fast. Nothing was happening. I was not fed a constant thread of hot topics or trending content. But I was not looking for it either.
So I just left.
The recent surge in Mastodonians inspired me to try this federated system again. At first I opened an account on mastodon.social. But this place was so crowded. I did not feel comfortable in the founders place. Although he boosts great cat pictures, I decided to move to another instance.
In my twitter bubble I found fellow Swiss people.
There were two instances on the rise: swiss.social and swiss-talk.net
I joined the former.
Sorry, I moved to the swiss.social instance.
The moving process was so easy and stress free.
Although I have to admit, I didn’t do that much on mastodon.social.
Once I got settled in, I started to search for topics that I am interested in.
I also added some tags to my profile, so that I can easily access them.
Now I got a nice local timeline with other Swiss and a nice federated timeline, which moves way too fast.
I love that the timeline is indeed a timeline. The toots are in chronological order. It does not depend on how many likes or boost you get. It does not depend on how many followers you got. It just gets posted according the fifo principle.
I don’t get every function about Mastodon yet, but I like it very much. It’s a bit more effort to get stuff to your start page, but it is that what you chose to see.
The instances are often themed. There is the medibubble or an instance suited for artists and of course the regional ones like swiss.social. So join mastodon and have a twitter alternative that is better than the original - in my humble opinion.