A little procedure I follow to help noobs get seen by others. I used to do what most people do and boost their # introduction posts, but I think most people want to see more natural engagement and sort of glaze their eyes over when they see the intro tag, so here’s what I do:
- Create a list called “noobs,” hidden from home timeline.
- Go to # introduction
- Follow every poster with fewer than say 25 followers and add them to “noobs”
- Periodically browse “noobs” for interesting* toots, boost them
- Periodically unfollow accounts in “noobs” (do not remove from list! That puts them in your main stable of follows!)
- Repeat
I don’t consider it spam-following, because I’m actually giving these accounts a good deal of attention and a good shot at being seen by a few hundred more people. Often I’ll genuinely like an account and remove them from the list instead of unfollowing them. I haven’t really tested this method’s effectiveness, but I thought I’d put it here for others to consider.
*I have a fairly eclectic profile, so I’ll boost just about anything that’s not asinine.
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Maybe if there was an automation to help find relevant and interesting content, like some sort of algorithm… oh no.
This is more about getting people followers than helping them find accounts to follow.
I like this idea! It helps get people some traction out there without them needing to put effort into fumbling around how to do it. Kind of like a push start. I’m going to start doing this!
Also, introduce them to the gup.pe concept where social groups can be formed on Mastodon:
What new Mastodonians need to understand is that they need to follow hashtags, not people. This should be the first welcoming sentence on any instance.
What hashtags do you follow? Most things I try to look up end up having a majority of the posts in Japanese or German.
#ecology for example has a lot of nice English posts.
I follow both, but a lot more people/organizations than hashtags.
Thing is, one thing people want out of a microblogging experience is the validation of followers. If it was all about the hashtags, they’d be on Reddit or Lemmy, not Twitter and Mastodon.
It would be nice if instances automatically maintained a new and low connection count user feed so that people could browse it occasionally and help people find others to connect with.
That could be done either as part of the instance software or via a bot that runs through the instance user list and updates the feed every so often.
