Yeah, I hate the explore page on Mastodon. At least on my instance I guess. Nothing interesting there, just the same few accounts posting political takes. Or shitting on reddit/Twitter. Gets very old very quick. It's usable when you follow hashtags but it's really not there yet.

Not just worse, it's also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon's vision of an "Everything" feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.

The reason that's an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn't figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.

Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our "All" feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.

This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they'd run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences... when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.

Anyways, point was... Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon... Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.

Not just worse, it's also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon's vision of an "Everything" feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.

The reason that's an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn't figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.

Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our "All" feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.

This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they'd run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences... when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.

Anyways, point was... Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon... Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.

Start following a few hashtags. That will give you a solid starting point.