this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
55 points (95.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35776 readers
1070 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I have created an account, and I would like to (try to) use mastodon. But I don't know who/what to follow? How does one discover interesting hashtags, or people to follow ? Mainstream personalities or media are not on mastodon

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

If there are people you enjoy on YouTube or other forms of social media, check their profiles or about me and see if they have mastodon links.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The big question is: What are you interested in and on what instance are you? For new users the local timeline is the best way to start building your network. Of course that only works if you picked an instance that caters to your interests.

Honestly that's my biggest problem with the official app always pointing you mastodon.social. It hides away one of the best on-boarding features in order to be more familiar rather than trying to make it work.

Another way to find people is the fedifinder, a tool that shows you who of the people you follow on twitter also has a mastodon account (assuming you are on twitter)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You can search by hashtags for posts. What I do is I am on a smaller instance so I just view the local timeline.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Find @fedifollows. I boosted a bunch of newbie resources last night if you want to hit me up on there (DM me).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Seconding this. It really helped me discover stuff on there. There are interesting things to follow. They're just hard to find.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Mastodon I've found has a bit of a discoverability problem, but there are ways.

1 ) Start off with your local timeline: these are all the people that are on your instance as well. If you've chosen a "specialized" instance most of these people will have something in common with you: mastodon.gamedev.place for instance is filled with indie developers, mastodon.art is full of artists, and so on. The more general instances like mastodon.social have a lot more activity, but there's no implicit link between people on it. It's a trade-off: the more specialized of an instance you're on the easier it is to find people like you and build a tight community, but the smaller the instance. The more general the instance is the more activity and people are on there, but less of it is relevant to you.

2 ) Go search up some hashtags of topics you like. For instance if you like baking go see what's on #baking. If you're interested in pictures of moss #mosstodon is great fun. If you like pokemon #pokemon, and so on and so forth. You can naturally follow hashtags themselves, but you can also try to use that to find people you may enjoy following - after all, if someone is posting baking pictures and you like baking maybe you'll enjoy following them!

3 ) Go snoop out other instances. Some Mastodon clients allow you to directly view the local feeds of other instances, but you can always just go straight to the page of said instance. Find a few specialized instances for topics you like, scroll through the local feed for a bit, and follow people that look interesting to you.

4 ) Google: when I joined Mastodon I just googled a few people I like or followed on other platforms and saw if they had a Mastodon. There are also plenty of "Who to follow on Mastodon" articles out there.

5 ) In the "explore" feed you'll find posts that are trending on your instance: often at times there are some good users there to follow, albeit it can get a bit "samey" if there's a big news story going on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Simple answer, you have to build your community. Start by searching #hashtags for topics that interest you. Hashtags are king on Mastodon. They can lead you to interesting people to follow. Next, start looking at your local and federated feeds to see who is discussing what, and follow those that interest you. Also, use #hashtags in your responses to make your stuff findable.

Hope this helps.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There’s a lot of good info already in here. I’d also recommend checking out the trending post tab, that’s where you’ll typically find some of the posters with the highest number of followers (“hubs” in the Mastodon zeitgeist). I’d also recommend that you follow Lisa Melton https://mastodon.social/@lisamelton. She boosts a ton of stuff and almost single-handedly acts like Mastodon’s algorithm. Her boosts will give you lots of cool accounts to follow, and at the very least will populate your timeline.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I literally just googled "who should I follow on Mastodon". There's tons of articles out there with lists of people that may be interesting to you that you can read about, and then search for them on Mastodon and follow them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Check out the federated timeline.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I just googled the people I follow on Twitter to see if they're on Mastodon.

load more comments
view more: next ›