Fediverse

Who’re you hoping to follow? I might be able to recommend a few folks.

That's the thing for me, is that I don't actually have anybody in particular that I want to follow. I was never a Twitter user, so I don't really have a list of accounts that I'm looking for. But as a user exploring the platform, it's always good to see names that you recognize, even if you aren't intimately interested in them.

On Twitter, if I came across a post from someone like Bill Nye, for example, I at least know who that is and what they do, and what impact that has in regards to their opinion. But on Mastodon, the top post on my feed will be from Charles Shoemaker, an Arch Linux developer with a passion for backyard composting (just making the name up, sorry to any Charles Shoemakers out there who I have just slandered). As somebody who may be just browsing the platform idly, it makes it harder to care about the content I'm seeing, if I have no idea who the people are or why I should feel connected to them.

Obviously, that's what a lot of people come here for, though. And I also get that and think it's great, but I think that it would be better-suited to a longer-form platform (perhaps a Fedi-platform that's formatted a bit more like old versions of Facebook, when they still had a focus on user-to-user engagement). I feel like microblogging is meant for feed-scrolling behavior, but the majority of Mastodon users want it to be more like full-blog engagement. Though, I'm still exploring that part of the Fediverse myself, so maybe I'm just looking at it through a narrow lens right now.