It is similar to Bluesky, yes. They both got a lot of inspiration from Twitter (before Musk turned it to shit/X).

And I would say that the discussions are more shallow than on Lemmy. Even though Mastodon has a higher character limit than Twitter and many Mastodon instances effectively remove the character limit, it’s still fundamentally a platform for shortform interactions. Infodumping is rarely seen, because you need to create a silly number of chained messages.

On the flipside, though, you get to know people. I do appreciate the time I spent on Mastodon, because of that. It’s a very different perspective as not everything is about discussing cold hard facts, but rather also people’s hobbies and struggles and whatnot.

If not, how do you find stuff you care about?

You go to explore, or your home instance feed and follow people and hashtags.

If you have interests, definitely try finding them in the hashtags.

And is reblogging the equivalent to upvoting?

There are no “upvotes”. The idea is that you’re in your little bubble with a handful of followers, and so is basically everyone else. When you find something neat, you boost it, to share it with your followers. If your followers also like, they can boost it as well, and that way, it can spread in a viral way and reach everyone. Or not, if it’s not that interesting and fizzles out.

There are no upvotes because there is no home page. It’s entirely right now. You pick it up, you scroll for a bit, you do something and then you put it down.

I recommend the “federated” feed, to see what I mean. Normally, your home feed is filtered to what you have followed. “Federated” is everything you device can see. All of it. Right now. Slowed down a bit so you can read something, but it’s a cool “stream of consciousness” thing.

Do they have memes there or what’s the range of content?

Everything you want. It really depends on what you filter for.

How does it compare to bluesky?

I don’t know in terms of tone, but the technical difference is that bluesky is only theoretically “independent”, with mastodon, you can have people in basements hosting servers and running communities.

Something you didn’t ask, but that I think is a major feature is filters. You can filter groups of keywords from your feed. So if you want to be informed, but you don’t really care about the specifics of [Team Rockets] Deeds, because they do something every day, you can set a filter for “Team Rocket”, “Jessie”, “James” and it will be hidden, but not completely, you can set it to appear as “team rocket did something again”. You can then still click on it, if you want, but it’s less in your face, if you don’t want to.

Is it as interactive as Lemmy or is everyone kinda shouting into the void?

I’d say it’s a somewhat different kind of interactivity than Lemmy. Your typical Mastodon user won’t have many followers, but that doesn’t mean you’re “shouting into the void”. Similar to Lemmy, you can comment on (reply to) others’ posts and lots of other people can join in the discussion that way.

Is there an equivalent to communities?

Not really, but you can follow hashtags for whatever topics you’re interested in. Or follow an account for something you’re interested in (e.g.: organizations, weather, hobby news, content creators, etc)

If not, how do you find stuff you care about?

Follow people/organizations/tags that you find interesting and their posts will populate your feed.

And is reblogging the equivalent to upvoting? Is it like a like and share in one?

Not necessarily. Reblogging (“boosting” on Mastodon) is just putting more eyes on someone else’s post by sharing it; it isn’t equivalent to an endorsement per se. You can favorite posts on Mastodon, but I don’t think there’s really an equivalent to a “like” or “upvote” button.

Do they have memes there or what’s the range of content?

The range of content is as wide as anywhere else, memes and all. Can vary from instance to instance, though. (e.g.: code of conduct on mastodon.social may be different from fosstodon.org’s)

How does it compare to bluesky? I have used bluesky but the tone there is kinda shallow imo, rarely any meaningful interactions.

I haven’t used bluesky, so I can’t comment on this one.

Generally you post onto the public “federated” timeline. With Mastodon this timeline contains posts from many different Mastodon servers that are all federated with each other, but it appears as one single timeline.

Hashtags are really central to the Mastodon experience. There is no algorithm that automatically suggests posts and accounts like on mainstream centralized services. Instead you gotta purposely use hashtags to discover posts and people. Add descriptive hashtags to your posts, the more the better. This helps people searching for specific topics find your posts.

You can follow people and they can follow you. Posts from people you follow will appear on your home feed. You can also follow hashtags and posts containing those hashtags will appear in your home feed. At the moment there’s no official support for communities like with Lemmy; following hashtags on topics you like is the closest you can get to that functionality. (You can also make separate lists of hashtags outside of your home feed).

The people and interests on Mastodon has a lot of overlap with Lemmy.

Here are a couple of resources you might find helpful: https://fedi.tips/ https://fedi.directory/

It’s not laid out like Lemmy is, because Lemmy is basically the fediverse version of Reddit, while Mastodon is more the fediverse version of Twitter. I’m not very good at using that format myself so I can’t offer much advice, but from what I’ve seen, what your feed is like depends a lot on what instance you join, to a much larger extent than on Lemmy (it’s a much bigger userbase than lemmy as well to my knowledge). I dont know of any equivalent to communities per se, you have to join an instance that is good for the kinds of things you’re looking for, and follow users that post or interact with that content. I think a favorite is more like a like, and reblogging is more like reposting for one’s followers and imstance to see too.

for what it’s worth, Mbin can see and interact with both Lemmy type communities as well as the Mastodon type of broadcasts. They are still two different parts, but within a single interface. Often I see things on the sidebar from them, usually dropped into “Random” as the algorithm doesn’t know what to put it in, and have the same thoughts as you. That it seems like it’s shouting out into nothingness. But…I could respond to the commentary, and it would bounce back to them. It’s just a different way to communicate, not as “permanent” as a discussion board format.

I feel like I just need to watch someone use it… and then will still wonder what the point is and why an interior platform has so much more traffic.