Alright! So one fine day I decided to check the Fediverse out and eventually joined mastodon. I've downloaded the Megalodon app on my phone and everything. And now I'm at a loss on what to do with it. In reality, how do you use Mastodon? I've never used Twitter before, so I'm completely new to this form of social media. All I saw were people talking about strange topics only they understood with no engagement whatsoever, and the other posts were straight up anime furry porn left and right. I only found out about Lemmy today. and it's even amazing than I expected. I'd love to hear how you use the Fediverse platforms and any tips you have.
Twitter is interesting when you follow people that are central to something, who keep their feeds clean. For example, someone posting about their three different hobbies and their job and family is very annoying if you are only interested in one of that.
Twitter alleviates that a bit by promoting posts that they classify as "interesting", which I think are those that get a lot of interaction. Maybe also other things. This way, you can follow a heap of people but you will see updates from the more interesting ones first.
Mastodon on the other hand just gives you a raw stream. Which is pretty boring because people tend to talk about all kinds of topics, and only few actually curate their content. And even if you follow just the curated content, it is very easy to miss some interesting stuff if you happen to not read every single post in your timeline.
Mastodon alleviates that by boosting, which puts a pushes a post on top of your timeline again. But then you only see it if you are looking at the timeline while someone is boosting. There is also some sort of a trending page being developed on there, but it is only for posts that get boosted at least five times or so, and it is not necessarily related to your interests. A bit like Reddits "all" community.
Reddit and Lemmy seem to combine the best of both worlds. Posts are sorted into communities that revolve around certain topics. So you can choose which topic to follow. And you never need to weigh following a person because they post about interesting thing A, but also boring thing B. You can choose to share only your common interests with that person by participating in the same community. Much like friendships work in real life.
On top of that, Reddit and Lemmy employ a voting mechanism to present the topics that appear most interesting to most users first. This is great, because even within a topical community, there are various subtopics to discuss, and not all are most relevant all the time. Also, naturally people say sometimes more interesting things, and sometimes less interesting things. And sometimes people spend more effort on a post and sometimes less. All totally natural things, but things that make participating into a larger community hard. Voting alleviates that, because people don't need to think if what they post is interesting to the community at the moment, but the community decides that democratically.
Reddit and Lemmy also allow following users (not sure if Lemmy already does), so one can still follow that one cool rock star or that one CEO or that one journalist that posts only interesting things about various topics.
I don't think Lemmy allows following users, but kbin does as well as interacts with Calckey/Mastodon. This allows you to follow topics their from the comfort of kbin (and if they enabled it, Lemmy too).
The trick with Mastodon/Calckey is to follow hashtags, not people in the case you're talking about. While not important here, it's the main way of finding other posts of interest there. So you can follow #topic and anytime someone posts about it, it'll appear in your timeline.
You are correct about the timing, if you're not on regularly you will miss posts. But the nice thing about the fediverse is the content is all the same, you just decide how you feel like experiencing it.