How to use Mastodon without feeling lost

So the social media hellsc…sorry, landscape is a bit chaotic these days. Like many people, I decided to stop using Twitter as much as possible and have been exploring alternatives. One of the places that clicked with me was Mastodon. To be honest, I tried it a few years ago as well and didn’t really grasp it at the time, but this time I got it.

Now, many people in my circles are actually on Bluesky and I haven’t really been interested in that because it’s such a walled garden. I can’t see what’s happening there, so how would I know if I like it?

Then I realised, the same is true for Mastodon. Yes, it’s open and you don’t need invites to join, but everyone’s Mastodon experience looks very different. I can sort of understand why people were intimidated by the server choice and never signed up, but I didn’t understand why people who joined left. Recently, Erin Kissane did a bit of asking around and now I get it a bit better.

One of the reasons seems to be that people just didn’t really find their people, or found it hard to follow people. I haven’t had this problem, and really the only thing that I would recommend is to set up the “advanced web interface” in Mastodon’s settings. This is how I mainly use Mastodon and it solves so many problems.

But let me just show you, through some screenshots of what it looks like for me when I use Mastodon: