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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

How do you discover content on Mastodon? I just intalled Tusky. Didn't have an account and te process of creating one was through some detour and I ended up creating one on qoto.org that I chose randomly. Now I have a feed with pretty random posts and another with even more random posts some in the language I don't know.

How can I find anything worth reading there?

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First, you check if the instance that you are subscribing to caters to your interests - signing up to a random instance is bound to be useless. Then you can just follow people from the local feed, or something that catches your fancy from the global feed. And if you find a mastodon user from a different instance that you are interested in (maybe in a google search), you can follow them and the system will redirect you so your instance connects you to them.

Aren't there some aggregators that group posts from various instances, rate them and match their contents with user preferences?

Discovery is definitely the hardest part of the fediverse. Your best bet is to join a server with similar interests and start following people.

Same experience here. I've really, really wanted to like Mastodon but feel like it's all just random toots. And then if I click the wrong button it is random toots in Mandarin!

We are generally so habituated to services that plunder our contact lists and auto-populate our social graph that we end up all dazed and confused when checking out privacy-respecting social networks. Like … where are my friends at?

In the fediverse, you can choose your community, you have choices. Most servers (instances) gather around a topic, common interest or subculture and have their own rules and etiquette. An easy place to get started is https://joinmastodon.org/communities. If you discover people who "live" on other instances, you can still follow them.

It might take more time to build your social graph in the fediverse than on the centralized and commercial services, but the satisfaction of having a feed that you put together yourself, without being influenced by nagging recommendation algorithms is worth it – at least to me!

EDIT: To answer your question more directly, I'll add some of the people and projects that I find interesting and follow (and that you probably won't find on other social networks). YMMV:

- https://mastodon.social/@mntmn (researcher building an open source laptop, amongst other things)

- https://social.coop/@compost (a magazine about the digital commonts)

- https://mastodon.art/@BenjaminBrinckmann (talented painter / artist)

- https://indieweb.social/@bonfire (a project building a system for easier self-hosting of federated services)

- https://chaos.social/@delta (Instant Email Messaging App)

- https://fosstodon.org/@flockingbird (Federated version of LinkedIn in the making)

- https://floss.social/@forgefed (Vocabulary and protocol for federation of project and repository hosting)

- https://mastodon.social/@zrythm (young DAW software project)

- https://chaos.social/@ConnyDuck (Creator of Tusky, now banned from Google Play Store)

- https://linuxrocks.online/@dnkl (Developer making the great terminal emulator "foot")

Thank you for the links. I follow all of them now.

But I think I know what my problem is and it's not what you think.

Mastodon seems to be user centered, but I don't want to follow specific users. I want to be fed with interesting content. So I'd prefer content centered fediverse.

The fediverse I'm looking for should be able to infer my interests and feed me content that is interesting to me as quickly as possible when I don't have any social graph. Because I don't have any relevant social graph. Not on any fediverse, not on twitter, not on Facebook, not on youtube. I just have some interests.

If I'm not mistaken, you can also follow hashtags, but I haven't done this myself as i prefer a high signal to noise ratio.

Another fediverse project that might fit your needs better is Lemmy, which behaves more like Reddit/HN.

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