As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users
3 years ago by AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦 to c/android
It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project
Jack Dorsey is the reason why some of these perennially online personalities moved to Bluesky. The AT protocol maybe decentralized but there's no unofficial instances of it yet (afaik).
I'm on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.
I wouldn't consider another VC money backed app/service anymore no matter how good the tech might be. I hope we all remember the hard lessons from the fiascos from the recent months.
This brings up my main questions with mastodon and lemmy… who is going to pay the server costs at scale?
It would be nice if those mechanisms began sooner than later.
Word. Mastodon is fabulous. There's not very many people, but I haven't encountered many assholes. And does it ever run smooth!
That's honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta's Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it's on the record that they've been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.
Also, remember there are a bunch of nice 3rd party options for Android, like: Tusky (personal favorite), Fedilab, Megalodon, & Tooot
I've been trying Tusky and Fedilab. They are better experiences for sure.
Just tried the new official app and it is much better than what it was before but the 3rd party offerings are still ahead as of now.
Just my 2 cents.
Wait Tusky is not the official app? I always assumed it was
I've heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter...uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, "it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use". At least, that's what I've heard. Never verified this myself.
Tusky is definitely decent though.
It's not! The official app is relatively new, and Tusky has more features, or did the last time I compared.
I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I'm part of on twitter. Ever since musk's takeover, I've been using twitter less and less.
Same here. I love how fluid Mastodon's app is, especially compared to Lemmy's. But I scroll for a bit and there's nothing that interests me on my timeline.
No one is going to feed you content. It's a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.
But you gotta bootstrap it. There's a lot of interesting people and content in it.
There's a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.
There's hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.
I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it's so worth it and rewarding. So, don't quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It's a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.
And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.
So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.
Seriously, follow hashtags! If friends start to join boost their early posts so other people can find them too. You take the place of the algorithm on Mastodon, so you're ultimately responsible for curating your experience.
Though I will say, don't use the offical app. It lacks a federated timeline still, which is weird. If you like that UI though, Moshidon is a fork that adds some customization and the federated timeline, which is a neat way to see what's goin on.
Hit "Explore" and follow hash tags to grow your list of accounts to follow. It really helps a lot! Mine used to be like 2 minutes of scrolling and I'm done for the day. Now it's....um....I should get back to work.
I mean, isn't that a good thing? You shouldn't be doom scrolling anyways
Also, that's a temporary measure. As more people migrate, there will be more content.
there is still some work needed to be done on sync for lemmy meanwhile, you can try connect or liftoff for Lemmy
One of Mastodon's upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
It's surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don't suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance's users, which won't cover interesting things from other instances (unless they're specifically boosted).
Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don't follow, on the topics you have an interest in.
Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.
I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can't stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.
It's fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That's all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.
You still can. I used a tool called fedifinder to transfer my follows a few days ago.
First time I gave Mastadon a shot now. It's nice.
Special thanks to Kbin to introduce me into decentralized social media.
Maybe I should give Mastodon another try.. I couldn't really find anyone to follow.
To get an immediate curated feed, I recommend following @lisamelton@mastodon.social. She boosts all sorts of interesting stuff from others. It's a great way to find other accounts you might want to follow.
Another good account to follow is @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services (https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows) They highlight interesting accounts to follow.
I am here since the blackout using Jerboa, but I get an error when I click on it, doesn't it work in the App? I tried the instance website and put it in the search bar, but it doesn't work either and unfortunately I don't find any tutorials how to follow mastodon users from lemmy, do you know how? Another thing I don't quite understand: with my Lemmy account I can use other Fediverse services like mastodon. And my understanding is that kbin is not the same as lemmy, but another service such as mastodon? So why does kbin come up in my all feed but nothing from other Fediverse services?
Lemmy is also pretry similar to old.reddit. No recommendation or anything so its an easy migration.
I have only used Twitter and Mastodon sporadically, but its definitely more of a pain to discover communities since its more user oriented
I like and use Tusky on my phone, and it also works as a Pixelfed client. But it's not very good on tablets (in landscape). It not only doesn't maximize the width of the screen, but you can't scroll the feed from those unused sides of the screen. And one UI feature that Tusky is missing is the indented thread-depth lines that help you keep track of all the different reply sub-threads.
The problem with mastodon is everyone is on mastodon.social
I mean, same can be said for Lemmy, how most people are on world/ml/beehaw. Doesn't have to be the case, though. I have two accounts on Mastodon, one on Baraag the other on Mas.to, alternative instances exist
How good is Mastodon in general to follow football news? Transfer rumours and all?
Not there yet - but there are bot accounts that feed you their tweets. LOL Look up the accounts you have on Twitter for news and you'll most likely find a bot account for them on Mastodon. That's how I'm keeping up to date.
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.
You probably found a bunch of people with niche (if any) interests and/or friends from Twitter or other social media who are active enough for your feed to be populated. A lot of people use twitter to follow news, celebrities, journalists and shitposting accounts with large following as there's lots of discussions under tweets with massive reach. Most people don't interact themselves at all but just scroll. Mastodon doesn't have these big accounts as of now so there's not much activity for the majority of regular twitter users.
Care to share some tips for someone that's new to Mastodon? I've made an account but I've got nobody to follow on there and trying to discover new people seems fruitless because of how different the search on Mastodon is.
Start following a few hashtags. That will give you a solid starting point.
Follow some hashtags. Makes it active very quickly and lets you find accounts to follow.
What's a good way of finding people to follow on Mastadon?
Like the other user said following tags is a great way to engage with things you choose. Along the way, you'll find people that you find interesting and then you can follow them directly. It's much less about seeking people and more letting them come to you.
One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.
There's also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as http://fedi.directory and https://communitywiki.org/trunk .
Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you're interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: https://fedi.garden Check out their feeds and see who posts things you're interested in.
Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called "groups", which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. "retweets") every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate@a.gup.pe, and every time someone pings that (it's like including a hashtag), it'll boost that post and I'll see it too.
@jasonwaterfalls @Elegast I've just starting searching hashtags and finding people to follow that way
I just tried this on Mastodon's official app (Android) and that feature doesn't work for me.
Mastodon seems to become yet another rage cage like twitter, first thing I saw when I opened it yesterday was people bitching about politics, that's a BIG nope for me
Maybe this is just how all "Scream into the void" platforms inevitably ends up.
Like all social media, you have to curate it. I follow hashtags for cats, books, writing, fandoms, etc. The rage is minimum then because my homepage doesn't have politics or news. I actually do follow a couple of news sources, but their stuff is surrounded by an ocean of fun things so it's not nearly as bad.
I didn't even sign up, I just wanted to see what it was all about, whining about politics and general madness, just like twitter, not for me, so I didn't end up signing
Well, you had to open some Mastodon server in your browser. And there will be differences between them, just like what's on the front page of lemmy.world is different from the frontpage of lemmy.ml
It is extremely political, I've had a hard time filtering it all out. Every account posting memes tends to feel like they have a huge political chip on their shoulder. Kinda exhausting. I've had trouble finding the content that I used Twitter for.
Mastodon app is great for people coming from Twitter but I love my Megalodon <3
Megalodon is the best!
I don't think I'll ever make a Mastodon account, but I do like the rss feature so had been relying on that to get updates on certain projects. Now just need some Twitter accounts that haven't moved over to do the same. Some have websites, but don't even update it and relied solely on twitter to push update.
Twitter is mainly for self promotion than for users, so this seems pretty disruptive for them than it is for people like me.
No. Lemmy and Mastodon federate using the ActivityPub protocol, but that's not good enough for making mobile apps or other clients. They each have their own API for their apps and an app made for one federated platform won't be able to log into another platform's server/instance.
All your interaction with the Fediverse is done through your instance.
I couldn't find the button to follow hashtags on the official app, but it's there on Moshidon.
Maybe I should give it another look. I was frustrated that I couldn't view federated content, so I switched to a webapp.
Man there's literally only one thing stopping me from using mastodon and that's likes.
I know marketing, and shit, and likes sometimes skew things, but without likes any toot is given the same weight, no matter if it's a good or bad toot. There's no way for me to see through the chaos that emerges from this.
I know there are reasons not to do this, but I damn well know I'm not the only one, and I'm sure it would make it more appealing for a lot of ppl unfamiliar with mastodon. You could even make it optional so ppl can turn it off and there would be no harm done.
Was about to say, it's the boost function
Nothing can beat Fedilab. Trunks is a close second
Are you able to see that comment? I deleted it about six hours before you made your comment. What instance are you coming from?
Yeah I haven't figured out the story yet for deleted comments, I can see your deleted comment (with a note saying it was deleted) from programming.dev and lemmy.blahaj.zone.
I'm on kbin.social, and there's nothing showing that your comment was deleted.
I'm not sure how it works but I read something about deleted comments only being deleted on your instance and not on the fediverse
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@lemmy.world
DROID DOES
Welcome to the Android community on Lemmy. Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
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5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
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I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it's hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It's also decentralized, but honestly I'm not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don't like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it's the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
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