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Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

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Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#111

Post by WorldMaker »

dhruvkar wrote: post #102
WorldMaker wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote follow enough specific people you are interested in and some of the rest of the instance's traffic will show up in your instance's Federated Feed as it interests them. Sometimes if the remote instance's entire feed is interesting I might set up a "read only" account on that instance to get an idea of people to remote follow from my main account. I've heard good multi-instance clients can help a lot with that,…

Okay, yeah, doesn't seem to be too many out there. So no real way to do this now, except what you described. You can follow specific people, but no local timelines of instances.

Yeah, there are also interesting experiments out there, like some instances run bots to try to "collect them all" and follow almost everyone they can in the fediverse. The one that found my instance first was @federationbot@mastodon.host.

It's not something I've considered on my instance, to keep costs down and because I like the opportunity to curate it manually a bit.

Oh, and https://smeap.com/@max if anyone was curious to follow.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#112

Post by rayalez »

NoGravitas wrote: post #39
rayalez wrote: post #16

I have made HackerNewsBot [1] (it publishes stories with 100+ points), comedy bot [2] that reposts jokes and showerthoughts from reddit, writing prompts bot [3], and webcomics bot [4]. My favorite people to follow are: @Chrishallbeck@mastodon.social (webcomics artist) @lumen@mastodon.social (writes jokes) @Gargron@mastodon.social (creator of mastodon) @cwebber@octodon.social (author of ActivityPub) And a few cool eng…

I follow several of your bots! One feature request: webcomics bot should provide links to the original when posting, so that people can find webcomics they want to follow regularly.

Hi! Sorry, I wish I could do that, but the comics are taken from comics-related subreddits, and most of the links there are direct to images, they don't give credit to the author, so I can't do it automatically either.

I think a lot of the authors expect their images to be shared all over the internet, so they include a url to their site in an image.

Not everyone, and I understand that's not ideal. But the alternative is curating it manually (which I don't have the time for), or shutting it down (but many people seem to find it useful, so I figured I won't do that unless one of the comics authors complains).

If you want to help curating the comics - send me a message!

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#113

Post by csixty4 »

twodave wrote: post #50
kral wrote: post #34

If someone is interested, I'm the amin of an instance focused on functional programming: https://functional.cafe

This post pushed me over the edge--created an account. https://functional.cafe/@dave

And since @dave was taken I snagged @daveross :P

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#114

Post by lokedhs »

sridca wrote: post #74
kral wrote: post #34

If someone is interested, I'm the amin of an instance focused on functional programming: https://functional.cafe

Looking at the local timeline of functional.cafe there is hardly any tech related toots, much less functional programming. Is this expected of Mastodon networks? I noticed the same thing with bsd.network.

I'm @loke@functional.cafe, and I certainly post about other things outside my main programming interests. So far no one has complained about that.

I think the point of an instance with a topic has more to do with the fact that people on that instance tend to be people with similar interests to you, not that every single post is about that topic.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#116

Post by gvurrdon »

ColinWright wrote: post #29
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #20

I don't quite understand the relationship between the various instances on Mastodon. Once you join an instance are you stuck on that instance for life? What happens if you want to participate on another instance? Can I reply to comments on other instances?

I wrote a thing[0] about Mastodon a while ago. Currently there is no way to migrate an account, but that's being worked on actively, and progress is being made. You can already export your data, and who you follow, block, or mute. Ideas are being discussed as to how your followers can follow you when you move, but that's tricky given the entire concept of federation. This is explained on the page I wrote[0], but if a…

Useful information, thanks. I've followed your account, though I'm finding it hard to get into using Mastodon. A means to show the oldest unread Toots first, and to sync this across devices/web, might be helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#117

Post by ColinWright »

gvurrdon wrote: post #116
ColinWright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a thing[0] about Mastodon a while ago. Currently there is no way to migrate an account, but that's being worked on actively, and progress is being made. You can already export your data, and who you follow, block, or mute. Ideas are being discussed as to how your followers can follow you when you move, but that's tricky given the entire concept of federation. This is explained on the page I wrote[0], but if a…

Useful information, thanks. I've followed your account, though I'm finding it hard to get into using Mastodon. A means to show the oldest unread Toots first, and to sync this across devices/web, might be helpful.

The thing to do is ask about these things on Mastodon - people might answer, features like this might already be in the works.

I tend to just open up the browser interface and scroll down will I don't recognise things, then read upwards. I've wondered about writing a took to do that, the idea being that if I do so and find it useful then I can offer it to others, and then if it becomes popular then it might get integrated into the code. It is, after all, open source. My problem is that I can't see how the interface would work. "Displayed" is not the same as "have read", and if i's been a while then it might be along way back.

It's things like this that let to the "Things you might have missed" feature in Twitter. Does Mastodon need something similar? Personally, I prefer it as it is, but I can see how others might want something different.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#118

Post by gvurrdon »

ColinWright wrote: post #117
gvurrdon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful information, thanks. I've followed your account, though I'm finding it hard to get into using Mastodon. A means to show the oldest unread Toots first, and to sync this across devices/web, might be helpful.

The thing to do is ask about these things on Mastodon - people might answer, features like this might already be in the works. I tend to just open up the browser interface and scroll down will I don't recognise things, then read upwards. I've wondered about writing a took to do that, the idea being that if I do so and find it useful then I can offer it to others, and then if it becomes popular then it might get integ…

Similarly, I have thought about writing something, but lack of time and engagement have meant that I've never got around to looking at it.

The interface works well with the Twitter clients I've used, usually involving showing a count of unread messages which decreases as one scrolls up. All can be marked as read by scrolling to the top (e.g. by tapping on the count). I suspect it might be harder to manage given the federated nature, though.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

#120

Post by rainbowmverse »

gvurrdon wrote: post #116
ColinWright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a thing[0] about Mastodon a while ago. Currently there is no way to migrate an account, but that's being worked on actively, and progress is being made. You can already export your data, and who you follow, block, or mute. Ideas are being discussed as to how your followers can follow you when you move, but that's tricky given the entire concept of federation. This is explained on the page I wrote[0], but if a…

Useful information, thanks. I've followed your account, though I'm finding it hard to get into using Mastodon. A means to show the oldest unread Toots first, and to sync this across devices/web, might be helpful.

Mastodon generates an RSS feed for every user. Check out their web profile pages and look in the HTML header. Most popular RSS readers will just pick it up if you paste the profile URL in.
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