How visible is this to the average user? Just wondering because I have yet to see any spam at all in my Mastodon feeds. Big thanks to the admins for being on top of it!

If you care about privacy, which I understand, you probably want to leave quickly.

Just because you care about privacy it doesn’t mean that you have to stay indoors all the time. You can still hang around on the town square you just have to be conscious about what you do where.

A big part of caring about privacy is understanding how the platforms you use work and using them accordingly. With proprietary platforms this is often opaque and the rules can change. Open platforms are transparent and you can actually understand them - if you make the effort.

gotosocial might we worth checking out. It provides Mastodon-compatible APIs (so you can run Mastodon clients and UIs against it) but it’s less resource hungry and easier to deploy (in my experience). The caveat is that it’s less mature.

Subscribe to a post: just mention the bot in the comments.

Not a huge fan of the noise this adds to the threads. Would be nice if Lemmy frontends could provide better ways to interact with bots. For example custom buttons that would PM the bot with the appropriate message to trigger the action.

Gentoo is great if you know how you want things to work and know Linux well enough to make it happen. Gentoo gives you flexibility, transparency and great tooling to help you get there.

I am sorry but this is just completely wrong. Look at the live feed of mastodon.social which will give you an actual sampling of what people talk about and tell me how many Linux related comments do you see among the first 100 or so. I got 2 on my first try and 0 on the second.

I happen to be a long time Linux user but I don’t seek out Linux stuff on Mastodon. My feed is mostly boardgame related stuff which is what I am here for and what I follow. There is no algorithm so what you get entirely depends on what you follow.

Looking at the code it seems to be getting the feed from the mastodon.social instance’s federated timeline. So it’s definitely not streaming “the fediverse” but a decent chunk of it.

Some kind of federation for hashtag follows is what I’d like to see the most. Currently I am using a larger instance mainly to get a good chunk of the traffic for the hashtags that I am interested in. The ability to filter content for user follows would help in this area too. I want to be able to follow a user but only see their posts with specific hashtags.

Oh, and markdown support! Really miss having a proper way to do lists, literals and code blocks.

Fixed formatting

Mastodon

I. Web Clients

• https://phanpy.social/
• https://elk.zone/m.webtoo.ls/public/local
• https://statuzer.com/
• https://n1k0.github.io/tooty/v2/
• https://trunks.social/
• https://pinafore.social/
• https://nicolasconstant.github.io/sengi/

II. Android apps

• Plachi
• Rodent
• Megalodon
• Trunks
• Focus App

III. iOS apps

• SoraSns
• Ivory
• Trunks
• Radiant
• Feather
• Mona
• Woolly
• Tusker
• Manny
• Ice Cubes
• Mammoth
• Feditext
• Fedigardens

Friendica

• Relatica
• Firefish
• SoraSns
• Kimis
• MissRirica

mastodon.el is great if you are an Emacs user, works very well and you have all the usual Emacs conveniences on hand.
For Lemmy so far I am sticking with the default web UI and Jerboa. Tried some other alternatives but I keep coming back to these.

In the default Mastodon web UI you can simply click on a hashtag and then press the “Follow hashtag” button. If you want to follow a hashtag that’s not showing up in your feed yet then you can search for it and then click on it in the search results. If you don’t see the “follow hashtag” button that might mean that your instance is running a very old version of Mastodon. Hashtag follows were added in version 4.0 which came out at the end of last year.

One caveat is that hashtags follows only show posts that “make it” to your instance either because they were created locally or because another user on your instances followed the person who posted them. In practice being on an instance with a sizable user base or an instance that’s oriented towards your interests should work well.

I’d really like to see some client-API consolidation. A common client API that could efficiently handle both “microblog” style and threaded discussions (lemmy etc) and leave the door open for other discussion formats too. This would allow for clients/frontends to flourish even more and backends could compete on features and efficiency. The backend specific features could be expressed through an extension mechanism of the common API.

I prefer other options but it’s great that we have a bunch of decent ways to interact with the Fediverse. The more the better!