Question for Mastodon Users

Mastodon of course lets you interact with people from any other Mastodon servers; but it also has features that make it easier for you to interact with people from the same server. If you use Mastodon, do you find that you take advantage of these local-interaction features? Or do you mostly just interact with your followers and the people you follow, regardless of what server they're on?

Comments

[Mike Laursen]

Never use local interaction at all.

[Mike Laursen]

Oh, and you guys are on my local server, but I only saw your toot because I follow you.

[vansid]

While I understand that federation features allow me to follow or view posts from multiple servers, I pretty much only pay attention to users of my local server. The community on my chosen local server is a bit more focused, but I do like the option of being able to follow anyone in the ‘Fediverse.’ I also like being able to block entire domains if I feel like it.

I’m not stopping anyone from speaking, I’m just not listening to them.

[Eugene Volokh]

Very helpful, thanks! Can you elaborate a bit, please? Which particular features do you use that help you focus on your local server users? What do you find your local server users have in common? Can you tell us what server it is? I’d love to hear more about this.

[vansid]

I use an Android client called Fedilab to connect to my server, ‘noagendasocial.com’. Fedilab allows you to view only your ‘local timeline,’ which are posts (toots in Mastodon parlance) from my server. My server is affiliated with a podcast I listen to called ‘No Agenda’, which focuses on examination of the news media and how the mainstream media reports on major stories. Thus, the posts on the corresponding Mastodon instance are either related to this topic or the No Agenda podcast itself. I can certainly follow users from other federated sites, but I rarely do. Worse, the larger ‘Fediverse’ is as much of a cesspool as the rest of the Internet, so very difficult to wade through the noise, which is why I often avoid looking at the ‘public timeline’.

[freeAgent]

I follow one other person on my “home” server. Everyone else I follow is on other servers. I think choosing a home server is mostly important for the type of content you want to put there. Some servers are general purpose, but many focus on specific topics and may not appreciate local users painting outside the lines.

[Shawn Levasseur]

Im using Mastadon as a Twitter substitute, so local instance features are irrelevant to me. Strangely I still am on a server that I chose Liberdon because it was oriented towards libertarians. But I tweet/toot on a wide variety of interests, and follow people from each of them, so I can’t even begin to find a server that intersects with all of them.

No matter what I want to be off the “big” servers. The big selling point of Mastadon is the federation and a lack of central control. I’ve even considered running my own instance all by myself ( and maybe offering up spots to trusted acquaintances)

[Caphon]

Have you seen any noticeable changes on the Twitter front since all the happenings? Drop or increase in followers? How are growth levels in followers at Mastadon behaving (climbing, plateauing)? Just curious.

[Eugene Volokh]

I haven’t seen any decline in our about 25K Twitter followers (@VolokhC + @VolokhSpeech + @VolokhGuns), but of course if some of them quit Twitter, that wouldn’t be reflected in those numbers. Nor have we seen any decline in “impressions” shown by Twitter analytics, but those various greatly from month to month in any event.

So far have 160 Mastodon followers, with only a few joining each day; at the same time, we haven’t tried hard to publicize our Mastodon account, and of course we’ve been on Twitter vastly long than we have been on Mastodon.

[JonFrum]

What’s up with the advertising for Mastodon recently? I hope someone’s getting paid for this.

[Social Justice is neither]

Leftist temper tantrum that their enemies are no longer being exterminated from the public square like they demand. I look forward to the acceleration of their purity spiral that this will create and hopefully that will engender a return to tolerance of opposing opinions if only for self-preservation.

[Fuzzyone]

I find my local instance pretty irrelevant. I follow all kinds of people and hashtags from all over. I almost never look at the local timeline.