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Comment by giords | Hacker News Reader

From time to time I try Mastodon again and every time I ditch it. I joined the main server mastodon.social and still as of today it's pretty much impossible for me to perform effective searches and find content. Maybe I'm just unable to use it, I don't know.

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If after 6 years of it existing and it is still unusable for outsiders and not just for open-source fanatics, programmers or furries then it has no realistic chance for retention, let alone adoption.

especially because that can be a very tight venn diagram

Don't bother with search. You really need to start out following people you already know about, then when they boost posts check if the people who wrote those posts are worth following. I started following 1 person and now I follow 102 people.

Search is where a lot of these services fail badly. The search on most video sites besides youtube is garbage. In fact, Youtube is so far ahead that they recently made their search worse to satisfy other priorities besides competing with rivals.

I'm the same way - I just signed up (again) to the main mastodon.social server and realized I have to have a separate account for each server I want to be a part of? I'm just confused at this whole thing.

You can follow people on any server that yours federates with, but if you want to show up in a particular server’s local timeline and possibly see local-only posts (if the server has been modified to allow this) you’ll need an account on that server.

Thanks - that's not super clear to me (as a new user). I tried finding another server via an aggregator posted here and stumbled upon qoto.org. Seems like that needs its own account. Do I not get to see who posts from that server (qoto) on mine (mastodon.social)?

I wasn't able to join qoto so I gave up. The join screen never got past the display name/email/etc form but also showed no error. (This is with the official iOS app, I can only assume it's no better or worse on other apps).

You just need one account for all federating servers.

Think of it like a cross between Twitter and email. You can see what the local users on your server are talking about, but you can also contact users on other servers run by entirely different people.

i think i've tried to use mastodon twice now, today begins the third attempt.

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