From my experience on Mastodon, it is almost impossible to be found.
Some of my toots feel like shouting into a void.
Is there anyway around this?
Hashtags, hashtags, hashtags.
Post stuff others will want to boost and follow you for. Engage with others in a friendly and generous manner. Have fun, there is no algorithm to game.
The notion of being “discovered” and (implied) launching an influencer career is… probably a long shot on Mastodon, where people enjoy shitposts more than celebrities.
Almost all my followers came from me responding to their posts. I them also explore hashtags to find content and people.
This is twitter advice, but I assume it works.
I had about 10k followers and about 100 likes per tweet in my heyday - but had pretty much left about a year before elon took over, and fully left when he did.
It was a lot of work with little reward, but it was fun.
- Post actually engaging content for your niche on a regular schedule, preferably more often than twice a day
- you can maybe stretch to two niches on an account but likely you just want one
- engage primarily with people in that niche
- get to know them, build an online friendship
- get into group dms or chats with multiple people in the same niche
- nepotistically retweet each others stuff, publically respond favorably to it
- unless you have a really interesting life, keep your real life out of it and focus on your niche
- expect this process to be a committed 12 month process - so that’s at least 1000 posts, all should be high quality enough to warrant engagement.
Are you using hashtags?
Yep! I’ve noticed that using multiple hashtags does produce results.
No.
Mastodon mindlessly copies big “horizontal” social network services, but they rely on algorithms a lot. Without algorithms, I think that platforms with categories and communities are better. That’s why before the major social networks, forums were quite popular for discussions.
I had a bit of a slow start on Mastodon, but after sticking with it for a while it’s now by far the best social media experience I’ve ever had. I follow less than 200 people, not all of them active, but their posts along with the content they boost provides a much more interesting feed for me than any algorithm ever has.
And when I post something I’ve put work into, it’s boosted by those interested and reaches far more relevant people than I’ve ever reached on other networks. And people trust it to be interesting because it’s boosted by someone they trust, rather than some faceless algorithm.
That said, the cost of entry is indeed a bit high.
This is why I like Bluesky more. The ability to create your own feed or follow feeds created by others makes it much easier to find content you want to see and even enables you to create something like a community by creating a feed that only aggregates posts that contains a certain hashtag or any other symbol or word or emoji.
That’s why I moved to bluesky and couldn’t be happier.
A FOSS alternative but with an algorithm.
