Oh my his finally. The only fediverse platform I use is Lemmy because finding interesting stuff and communities here is so easy. Mastodon is a pain in the ass by comparison, and starter packs really helped me find some cool accounts at the beginning of Bluesky.
My issue with starter packs is I don’t want to commit. What if I pick the wrong one? What if I pick the wrong one instance!?
The anxiety of picking the wrong instance is a design failure. Content discovery shouldn’t depend on getting that choice right.
The fediverse needs a better content discovery/curation infrastructure.
It’s actually a messaging failure, because picking “the wrong instance” is practically impossible. It really doesn’t matter what instance you’re in, since that’s not what limits or expands your available content.
Mastodon servers can have different character limits and other customizations, but migrating is supposedly easy so you got that quite right. In Lemmy though there is a ”local” feature where you can easily browse content in your own server. I never use it but I guess it could be useful for some communities.
Yeah, I am just saying some of the things I have heard. People don’t want the cognitive overhead of having to make decisions before trying a thing. They just wanna sign up and look around get a feel for something before deciding to dive in.
Mastodon in particular has a steep onboarding process. In order to get it useful you have too
- Sign up for an instance (which they have to find)
- search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.
There isn’t an easy way to stumble into new things. I found it tedious and others I have spoken with have said the same. I suppose Mastodon isn’t for me (hence why I am here).
I think there is a misunderstanding on what a starter pack means here because it literally tries to help with this point:
search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.
There is no way to pick a wrong starter pack because you can pick whatever you want, one pack, two packs, cero packs.
It’s just a list of accounts that you can follow in bulk
edit: well looks like you won’t be able to have a ‘follow all’ button on mastodon but its the same idea
Aren’t most instances connected and can’t you search all those instances for accounts you’d want to follow?
I don’t already know who I want to follow though. What do I search for?
BTW these are things I have actually discussed with people when they are trying to look into fediverse stuff. They don’t want to know how it works. They just want to open up their devices and turn their brains off.
Which is probably a good thing for federated services as it filters out a bunch of people we probably don’t want here. It’s like a test to join.
In the search tab in the mastodon app you can just look for # or names of things you find interesting.
About time.
Until there’s an easy way to have an algorithm other than date order, Mastodon will always be sort of “meh” for me.
It’s not just Mastodon. MANY open projects are working on theirs as well. Bonfire (as well as others) are working on Circles. Surf has curated feeds. :) It’s built into the Fediverse. ;)
I was hoping for this to come to mastodon :) and a new user will enjoy it as well!
Surf just released the web-based version too.
Have you tried it? I tried the mobile beta when they first announced it last year. I no longer have a Mastodon account though and ATM it only handles Mastodon. I’m on Bonfire. It was brilliant when I first tried it. It really felt line a magazine, which is what they’re going for. According to Mike when I had him on Fireside Fedi.
That’s good. The average user actually need a hand.
Not saying they need algorithms, but the fediverse can’t grow without something that fill the gap.
My big issue with starter packs was that I’d follow them, and they’d have some random content creator in it that was tangentially related to the starter pack. Great, that’s fine. I don’t need the same 12 people giving me news and updates, etc.
The problem was that they would inevitably be on my feed, constantly talking about other stuff I am not interested in, and hardly ever discussing the starter pack subject. Which again, is fine. But I don’t want that, I wanted the starter pack subject matter, and get unrelated content. So I just unfollowed all the starter packs.
I mean this is the problem with Twitter style media in general. You have to just like the people and everything they say. Which tends to lead to just trying to make clever quotes which don’t really give much in terms of content.
Sure, I didn’t necessarily think it was going to “solve” anything, it was more just a proposed solution that does not work in practice in its current form.
Yeah Ive never really been able to make a Twitter style feed work for me. I get the impression that Twitter is mostly just about everyone trying to be the cool kid that gets noticed, but actual discussion and content doesn’t really happen much. Most people are too busy posting to read anything anyone else posts.
True. I use it more for sports updates and such, which was the issue. I’d follow an NFL starter pack, and I’d get some journalists and insiders, and then just some random dudes with a podcast from 2 years ago and now they write about Anime and van life or something. Just doesn’t work in its current format like that lol.
Aside from these forum style accounts, BlueSky is the only actual social media I have, and my engagement is pretty low. But it serves its purpose for me
Yeah, you don’t want starter packs, you want the threadiverse (obvi). These are individually curated by the community and irrelevant topics are downvoted and/or (hopefully) removed.
Eh. They have 2 different purposes in my mind. Here, I want to discuss things and learn specifics or engage in a topic. On Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon type social media, I’d rather just scroll it and not engage. I want to see the “headlines”, and then decide to delve deeper elsewhere if it warrants. Which is why the starter packs didn’t work for me, because it consistently served me content I didn’t care to see. Here, I’ll check out /all just to see what is floating around in other circles.
With how microblog media works I think those packs should have been tags, not accounts
That was my thought. I think some of them work that way; I do have one that gets posted to the feed when someone responds ONLY with “overheard”, so no extra stuff gets posted. It’s pretty funny to scroll sometimes lol.
It just needs some better filtering somehow.
I followed a science starter pack, thinking it’d be, well, wall-to-wall science with a bit of random everyday stuff mixed in. Right?
Nope. Turns out, thanks to American current affairs, almost all of its members post political content almost all of the time. Close to the last thing I want to see on social media. (I don’t blame them, as they’re being hit hard by it all.)
To make it worse, most Bluesky users don’t “do” hashtags or content warnings (unless it’s promoting something - remember to like and subscribe!), so it’s incredibly difficult to filter out the clickbait and rage-sharing. 😟
I think you can block posts with certain words on Bluesky.
You can. But guessing all the variations of nicknames for Trump, for example, is a never-ending game.
God forbid anyone there use a ‘politics’ (or even ‘uspol’ in my example) hashtag…
Neat! I either followed accounts from elsewhere, or they randomly found me and I found them back, or or I started using tags and people comment on my things and we follow each other sometimes.
The packs are probably much easier!
Amazing!
