I started to really build my following on Mastodon when Twitter fired their accessibility team, which was the same time as all the other Twitter disasters that drove people away. However, I had it really easy: I’m blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people’s followers and shout about my username and instance, and everything came together. I have people who have expressed interest in joining but who are not blind or part of any other specific community like that; they just want to check it out. I’m not really sure what that’s like, and not sure what to recommend to them either. Are there some hashtag lists anywhere so people can find posts/users that align with whatever they might be interested in? How do “normal people” find their people?

  • minneyar@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    For one, I’ve found following Feditips to be very useful; they give a lot of good advice on how to use the Fediverse and find other people. They are a bit Mastodon-specific – which is fine if you’re actually using Mastodon, of course – but a lot of their advice applies to other Fediverse instances like Firefish or Akkoma, too.

    The general advice I’d give is:

    • Use hashtags! Put hashtags in any post you want other people to be able to find, and find out what hashtags are popular for whatever kind of content you like, then search for them regularly.
    • Many people start by making an account on mastodon.social first because they’re the largest instance, but it’s easier to find people with similar interests if you join an instance focused around that; then, you can look at the local timeline to find people talking about things you like.
    • If you know a lot of people on Twitter, you can use Fedifinder to try to find any of them who have Fediverse accounts.