We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.
I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already.
For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control.
As for ideas and feedback..
"follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time.
You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven.
As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that.
Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph.
> so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic
Rapnie: yes, that's what's missing for me. If I'm looking for people interested in fiction books, anime or sitcoms, it could be useful to just explore those topics. That's how I end up discovering people on Twitter right? See there's a discussion on the latest episode of XYZ show, and them see their profiles and follow
Gargron: Thanks so much for the response, and all your work so far :)
On a good note, I absolutely LOVE that we can tag one specific post as NSFW, and that we can add the spoiler/TW to hide the rest of the post, So damn useful
Same, most of my friends aren't on Mastodon, many of the content creators I'm interested in aren't either. And trying to explain Mastodon to random non-technical people is frustrating, they don't want to think about the social service, they just want to use it. Having to think about providers and federation and compatibility is too much effort for posting cat photos. So they stay on Facebook.
Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse.
In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow who they are used to from one single client. Would that help you?
You don't need to join the instance to see its directory.
When I started my own instance, I went to a handful of different instances and looked at the directory. Then I started following the ones that seemed interesting. That was enough for me to bootstrap my feed to the point of something useful.
