What I've learned so far, for the benefit of other #Elongate refugees:
1) The best way to find people is to browse the #introductions hashtag. It's like walking into a party, talking to people at random, and deciding who you want to know more about.
2) The federated timeline is a firehose of extremely free speech with a very low signal to noise ratio. Your home or local timelines are probably better bets, but if you want to look into the unfiltered heart of the internet, you do you.
@peterdrake also depends on the size and mood of your instance; even federated changes depending on what ppl in your instance boost/follow. I think its worthwile exploring multiple instances for different local and federated feeds, while seeking which acc to follow.
@peterdrake As a newbie, I've found the Fed TL very useful. I'm looking for "topics" more than people - and the firehouse (while pressurized and will blow you off the back of a tricycle if you drink from it) has done a good job of getting me started. YMMV of course. I may have just gotten luck based on the times we're living in right now.
>Federated timeline is a firehose of extremely free speech with very low signal to noise ratio.
Nigger didn't you guys fucking leave Twitter because you were *ALERGIC* of free speech? Pick a lane and stick with it.
@peterdrake
> The federated timeline is a firehose of extremely free speech
It's pretty much equivalent to the output of a search engine asked to list web pages as it indexes them. I've been in the 'verse since before Mastodon was a thing and I've almost never looked at the federated or local timelines.
@peterdrake
To find like-minded people in the fediverse, I recommend you:
* search hashtags of your interests, follow people posting them
* follow people they boost
* follow people who reply to or follow you
Obviously you want to read their bio and check their recent posts first, to make sure their posts are (mostly) in your language(s) and that they tend to contain things you want to see, and nothing you definitely don't.
@peterdrake You're totally free to mute whole instances to make the Federated timeline manageable. It's what I did, but yes, it'll need to have some time invested into that part before it's looking nicer.
I've muted most rightwing instances and it's looking a lot better now for me.