A personal letter in reply to a local user I just sent.
How can a new user in the Fediverse start finding interesting people and making connections?
Some ideas and suggestions, maybe they could be useful to others.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello and welcome to Qoto.
I would suggest you look at my profile, any info I intended to share is posted there, along with most of my toots, done in public mode.
For a new user in Mastodon, it's a good thing to post some info about yourself. This can be done in your profile itself, and also with an "Introductions"post which is specifically done for that; tell people what you do, what you are interested in, maybe hobbies and a general idea of your location (don't need an exact location, best kept private).
Usually, these posts are done and "pinned"to the user's profile so any visitors can see and find them easily. And we use a hashtag #Introductions so it also gets indexed and easily found that way.
Mastodon and the Fediverse are quite interesting, but it takes a bit of time and patience to make friends here. Replying to people's posts does help, any posts that you find useful or have an opinion on, adding a comment will get the poster to become familiar with you.
Right now there's been very little social posting here at Qoto.org, we used to have some frequent users and friendly chatter (all started in the same manner I suggested above, by commenting and reacting to each other's posts).
Sadly, people come and go; I have been very active and am a moderator here, but have done very little posting for the past month or so.
Any posts you make here are seen by many people out in other servers as well. It's also a good idea to find interesting conversations in the Home (the little House icon) feed or the Federated feed (much busier, the Globe icon). I have responded and got involved in great conversations in these places, and you start making friends in other servers as well.
Hope you enjoy your stay, and find many interesting conversations to be part of. The Fediverse is quite interesting, although for a newcomer it might feel less welcoming than Facebook, for example. But it's much richer and more interesting once you start getting to know people and places around here.
Have a good day! 😄
