Trinsec @Qoto @trinsec@social.cleverlibre.org

Apologies to Percy B Shelley:

I met a traveller from a distant land
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in cyberspace. . . . Near them, in the cloud,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the tagline, these words appear:
My name is Elonmusk, King of Twitter;
Look on my Wealth, ye Mighty, and despair!
No-one beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and empty spaces stretch far away.”

If you've noticed your Home timeline here is pretty quiet it's because at the other place you were constantly hit with 'here's a tweet someone you follow has Liked', or 'here's another from someone you don't follow but someone you follow follows them!', or just general spam. So your timeline was constantly full of things you really didn't want to see and hardly any content you actually cared about.

In this place you only see posts from those you follow, so remember to boost the good stuff!

Mastodon is is the 5th or 6th social media platform I've engaged with in a serious fashion, but it's been awhile since I had to start a profile from scratch. In the process I have relearned the one constant truth of all social media -- until you have accumulated at least 300-400 connections, the flow of information is going to seem skewed and limited, and you are going to wonder whether it is worth your time and effort.

Thus, echoing what others have said, you need to do more than just set up a profile and lurk, thinking an algorithm will direct information your way. You need to peruse the "Following" and "Follower" lists of people whose contributions you find interesting, then connect. Start with your local server and its Group and Profile directories (much easier to do from the web instance). Look for people you have followed on other platforms, and then look through their connections. The distributed nature of the fediverse (the so-called siloes that seem to cause a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from people still clinging to twitter) can make it a bit more difficult to find and connect to people quickly, but patience will be rewarded. Take the time to dip into other people's timelines, and connect to those that maintain interesting and active feeds. You will quickly notice a perception of increased 'quality' in your newsfeed once you have a few hundred links.