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Ask HN: Who would you recommend following on Mastodon?

by rolivercoffee on 5/3/22, 4:48 PM with 11 comments

I've had a Mastodon account for a few years but it feels like the time to dust it off and reassess.

In the past I followed a lot of bots that cross posted info from other sources as the original sources or people weren’t on the platform. This always felt a little unsatisfying as you can't interact with a bot and they're often a little too noisy - posting hundreds of articles a day. (although that said there are a few I'll certainly stick with)

I was wondering who would you recommend following and why?

  • by hutattedonmyarm on 5/3/22, 6:32 PM

    https://mastodon.social/@Gargron for obvious reasons

    My Mastodon feed is primarily in German, so I'll recommend some pixelfed users instead (which you can follow from mastodon!). All of them simply because I like the pictures they ppst

    https://pixelfed.social/Charlie https://pixelfed.social/cos https://pixelfed.social/jett1oeil

  • by proactivesvcs on 5/3/22, 6:42 PM

    I recommend scrolling through your local instance's timeline and finding out. Or if it's quiet (perhaps you've rolled your own?) you can often browse other instance's, even without an account. If you're feeling brave, try the federated timeline; this will need some liberal use of the block / instance block feature before it's a manageable firehose, though :-)

    Any good / mature client will let you search for tags, and will give you posts and profiles that mention them. This is one of the best ways to find people and conversations that interest you. You can also "pin" tag searches as a timeline and then they're always there, always showing conversations that may interest. You can often add several tags to one timeline to group interests.

    Make sure your profile has a bio in it and you've added your interests as tags in your profile. Helps folk who are searching for contacts able to find you. Make a new #introduction post, with your interests as tags and you may find people randomly finding you and connecting. When you post, if it's relevant to include tags, make sure you do so - again so we can find you if we want to talk about that, too.

    We don't know what interests you, what turns you off, and what you want to engage with. You're the best person to answer this question but it does require a little bit of legwork :-)

  • by JohnL4 on 5/4/22, 1:58 AM

    My technique so far has been to join interesting-looking instances and read the local stream. People who say smart things I follow. At some point I'll coalesce my follows into one account, I guess. I think continuing to do that, along with following boosted toot authors if they look smart/interesting, will eventually generate a good list of follows.

  • by truffdog on 5/3/22, 5:44 PM

    https://mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo has a nice mix of intro to Mastodon stuff and interesting math and science stuff

  • by rflec028 on 5/3/22, 6:36 PM

    Poast is by far the most interesting and active instance, though I don't have an account there, just on a smaller but similar pleroma instance. If you want to interact with real people go there.

  • by ozten on 5/3/22, 9:26 PM

    Search for hashtags for topics you're into. Even if the search results say "0 talking about" #foo, click it. Then you will get a stream posts from across the Fediverse.

  • by benibela on 5/3/22, 11:16 PM

    I also made one and do not know anyone to follow

    But you could follow me, @benibela@mastodon.online

  • by h-w on 5/4/22, 2:34 PM

    For pictures of mushrooms, poetry and t aoish aphorisms: @hw@c.im

  • by assemblylang on 5/4/22, 2:25 AM

    Here some people I follow:

    ---

    For commodore 64 news and projects

    @allc64@nerdculture.de

    ---

    For command line tips and tricks

    @climagic@mastodon.social

    ---

    For kubuntu news

    @Kubuntu@mastodon.technology

    ---

    For lubuntu news

    @lubuntu@mastodon.technology

  • by viggity on 5/3/22, 5:48 PM

    Elon Musk