So I’ve tried Mastodon a couple times now and so far it simply doesn’t click. Which is fine, it doesn’t have to. But I’m thinking maybe I just don’t know how to navigate the platform yet. Is it as interactive as Lemmy or is everyone kinda shouting into the void? Is there an equivalent to communities? If not, how do you find stuff you care about? And is reblogging the equivalent to upvoting? Is it like a like and share in one? Do they have memes there or what’s the range of content? How does it compare to bluesky? I have used bluesky but the tone there is kinda shallow imo, rarely any meaningful interactions. I’m Gen Z so maybe I’m just not the target audience? But Idk how much that even matters.
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.
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.
Everything you want. It really depends on what you filter for.
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.