Ask HN: Am I using Mastodon wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I using Mastodon wrong?

I made an account on mastodon.social. Posted about a variety of topics, observing to use hashtags that people actually follow, but... almost no engagement whatsoever?

Maybe I'm using it wrong? I know there are many thematic instances that mastodon.social is federated with, but would I need to get an account on each of those to ever get any interactions? With no federated auth (afaik) no way I'm gonna get even more accounts to which I'm gonna forget the passwords.

Edit: probably turning on these two is going to help: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/814/483/545/218/588/original/c53e77a530927f2f.jpg

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I made a bunch of Mastodon search tools that are available free and free of ads at https://mastogizmos.com/ . (You can use the site on your phone but it works better on desktop.)

If you're looking for people to follow or interact with I recommend Hashtag Harvest, which will give you results for a hashtag search but also show you related hashtags and users associated with those hashtags. There's also Wikipedia-Mastodon Thing, which keyword-searches Wikipedia for articles which have associated Mastodon accounts or instances.

(I only started learning JavaScript a couple of years ago and I made MastoGizmos about a year ago, so you don't need to tell me it's goofy looking. I'm going to revamp.)

Also, I found that when I was wandering around the web I would see Mastodon people I wanted to follow. I made a little bookmarklet for ease of following-while-browsing. It's available here: https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/Mastodon-Follow-Bookmarklet .

Hope this helps. I'm researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host ; if you have an intro post tag me and I'll give it a bounce.

Discoverability is trickier on Mastodon. There is no algorithm to bring your posts to the masses. With a net new account with 0 followers, you are reliant on someone on your Local instance seeing and responding/boosting your post to their respective network of followers. You may have luck using hashtags in your post to reach those who have followed those hashtags, but even that I think has minimal effect unless you are using a niche tag that happens to be one that a lot of active folks follow (unlikely?). What this means, is you need to spend some time early on to build out a bit of a network before your own posts have any useful reach. I have a few things I've written up that can help...

On engagement: https://shellsharks.com/notes/2023/09/20/engagement-on-masto...

On building an audience: https://shellsharks.com/notes/2024/06/27/building-an-audienc...

A starter pack with tips and tricks: https://shellsharks.com/notes/2023/10/20/infosec-mastodon-st...

You posted this very relevant question (https://mastodon.social/@RicoElectrico/112814402646545749) but you included a hashtag that I filter out of my stream, because it's fucking annoying. I think Mastodon is much more specific in terms of what you should talk about and what you can read.

Like, look at this screenshot: https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/112813902808042779

That's how, I feel, serious/interesting people are using Mastodon. Less noise, more quality. As such, it's just like "SEO" - if you want to appear relevant, try being relevant. Use hashtags and talk about things you are interested/knowledgeable in, imo.

Also picking a good instance is important - it allows to have a local timeline that's relevant to you.

Looks like you are

https://mastodon.social/@RicoElectrico

I am

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

I can’t say I get a huge amount of engagement but I do get some. My content that performs best is pictures of flowers like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112280831383416944

with the hashtag #bloomscrolling.

I read that about half of people say they mostly follow hashtags, others mostly follow other users. You want to reach both of these.

You are hardly following anybody, I think you should try to find some friends and get some mutual followers. Adding the word “searchable” to your profile will also improve your visibility.

Follow more people, and more people will follow you.

Also, it isn't Twitter. You're not going to make huge numbers, nor should you expect to.

Also, if you can afford it, a hosted install on masto.host (which I use[0]) will let you federate, but you'll end up using too much space to stay on the lowest tier.

And you can have multiple accounts on multiple servers, which is what I did before (now they redirect to my one instance) and it's manageable through a third party client or password manager.

[0]https://krapp.masto.host

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