Good luck. Hope you like it. I never really used Twitter because I felt like it was hard to figure out how to use it to see interesting stuff in your feed. Then I tried Mastodon and had about the same experience. Not sure how it is now, but I tried a few months ago (maybe January or something) and there wasn’t a ton of activity so it was stale after a few wks using it and I gave it up.
I’ve like Lemmy a lot better but I think that’s because I always liked Reddit better.
Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people’s websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.
Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.
When you first start do a search on hashtags for subjects that you like, and subscribe to them. That’ll quickly build up a feed for you to scroll through.
Then you can add people after that once your feed is established.
They’ll tell you to sign up to small instances. Honestly ignore that advice. There’s a bug nobody’s fixed since 2016 that makes smaller instances nonviable imo. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34
I should try Mastodon
Good luck. Hope you like it. I never really used Twitter because I felt like it was hard to figure out how to use it to see interesting stuff in your feed. Then I tried Mastodon and had about the same experience. Not sure how it is now, but I tried a few months ago (maybe January or something) and there wasn’t a ton of activity so it was stale after a few wks using it and I gave it up.
I’ve like Lemmy a lot better but I think that’s because I always liked Reddit better.
The thing I liked about Twitter was following:
Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people’s websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.
Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.
Same here. Forum-like, message board like communication is more my style.
There are dozens of us I say! Dozens!
When you first start do a search on hashtags for subjects that you like, and subscribe to them. That’ll quickly build up a feed for you to scroll through.
Then you can add people after that once your feed is established.
They’ll tell you to sign up to small instances. Honestly ignore that advice. There’s a bug nobody’s fixed since 2016 that makes smaller instances nonviable imo. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34