Jeff YangI’ve been experimenting with following back everyone who follows me as best as I can. The experiment has been a huge success—and is no longer an experiment: I’ve had a richer feed and more diverse experience because of it. I’m now going to try to follow anyone who favorites or boosts too; it’s clear this place depends on cross-connection for discovery in a way that Twitter and other platforms only hint at. There’s no easy way to find content on Mastodon other than to be exposed to it by people.
slow@originalspin This has been my experience too! I decided to follow everyone who interacted - favourite, boost, follow, reply - and my timeline is a right mix of interesting stuff. Some of it is stuff in common with my interests or posts but lots is new to me. I feel like I've finally found an enjoyable way of keeping my brain alive by learning new things 🙂
May-lee Chai
Dennis Jernberg@originalspin Me, I boost to expose people to things I feel are important or at least interesting. As for following people, my challenge as I see it is to get past the "rebuilding my lost Twitter fam" phase and venture out into the wider world.
"Cross-connection" is the word I've been looking for.
the roamer@dennis_jernberg @originalspin
I had a look at your timeline and like the rich mix of views that you present with your boosts. Would have loved to see more of your own posts, but can sense your presence through the mix.
Myself, I always felt that as a humble integrator, it is my duty to provide those who look at my timeline with views from people they haven't met before.
Julian Crosson-Hill, ACC@originalspin I've been following people who follow or boost as well. Ironically, the promise of social media had always been to build relationships online and meet diverse people before the algorithms turned it all into a big echo chamber.
@@originalspin
follows and boosts grow the federated part of peoples' instances!
follows and boosts grow the federated part of peoples' instances!
Eric Shields | 🅜assTransitKrow@originalspin you make an excellent point. It's exactly how I'm able to populate even a limited federating instance such as this.
DDimetrodon@originalspin I try to open up interesting posts to their original page to read through the full comments and occasionally copying the comment links to favorite from my server. Your post, as an example, shows only one comment when I click on it in sauropods.win, but when I open original page there's ~9 comments I didn't see on my home instance. By doing this I hope to increase the breadth of what my home instance can see by default, and hopefully eventually stop needing to OpnOrig so often.
Oblomov@originalspin doesn't this make your Home timeline «unfollowable»? I'm honestly starting to have problems keeping up and I'm pretty sure I follow fewer people than you do.
@oblomov not really. But I feel like I used to obsessively read everything that was curated on the twitter “for you” hashtag/news list as well as my own fairly large list of twitter follows, so I’m used to swimming in a sea of posts. I don’t know if following everyone works past say 5000 persons (!) but in the current state of things it has been fine.
SWestYou can always curate your feed preferences - use the #Filter utility to screen out content you absolutely don't want. If you find that one of your connections does send you too much content, you can go to Their profile and hide their boosts (which is totally reversible any time you want to review their interests). 😎
Kit@originalspin yes! I have been working on unlearning the "success" metrics of twitter that were beaten into our heads for so long. This community has been great so far.
@originalspin I still feel lost here. It's like having blinders on. I have to do more exploring.
Joy DenebeimThat's been clear to me for a while. Although it's what the relays are in theory supposed to do except that they're not the relays don't have any responsibility so you get crap. By having everything connected to a real person. If they end up being someone that you want to get rid of you can do it and that'll clip off every with everybody that's under them or whatever I like it
Brian Hawthorne@originalspin When someone follows me I check their profile to make sure they are not Nazis. If they are I report and block them. If they aren’t I follow them!
@bhawthorne glad I passed the test!
@originalspin Almost everyone passes. Because I’m not the only one doing this.
Ro Gutiérrez Abréu ✨️@originalspin me, too! I am introverted IRL but this place is so exciting and stimulating intellectually, creatively, and socially.
nadin brzezinski@originalspin @antonioserrata doing the same Hi
John Mierau, Serving Worlds
mbskis@originalspin I've been doing something similar. It's worked out well for me.
BlueDahlia@originalspin the feeds are definitely more rich and diverse…love it
☕️🥞 Jelly Doll 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️@originalspin I've followed back everyone since joining #Mastodon. It's awesome and actually works.
.. especially when you're an anxiety ridden introvert who would never just follow people out of the blue because that feels intrusive ..
Patrick, the Linux guyLets try this then, shall we 
Pinky Jones@originalspin I agree it's nice here on mastodon 🙏
Jon Collins 👨🏻💻@originalspin my god sir - are you riding a cheetah 🐆?
Alison@originalspin thank you for this - it’s taking me a while to get going in this site, you’ve explained it perfectly
Kavey (Kavey Eats)@originalspin I have been doing the same with the exception of accounts that starts in their bio that they are bots, or accounts with absolutely nothing in this bio, and no avatar. Luke you is brought me a wonderfully diverse feed so far!
Foxglove
OutsideInAK@originalspin Ive been learning all kinds of new info that I otherwise wouldn’t have known I was missing out on, like the social structure of Neanderthals.
Esther2007@originalspin Thanks for the follow. As a fan of your podcast and Fresh Off the Boat, I'm honored!
charlobo@originalspin
Good to see you here. Excited to follow you here too.
Good to see you here. Excited to follow you here too.
@Charlobo excited to follow you back!
Dgar