Are your posts actually good?

Follow people and hashtags, post interesting things, engage in nice conversations. The followers will come by themselves. There’s no algorithm on Mastodon to suggest posts or follows, thank Athena!

Just follow others and reply and boost a bit on stuff

Step one: Post

Post cool / funny / poignant shit which isn’t just pictures of your lunch. Lunchposters are the bottom of the barrel. At least post pictures of your cat. Same goes for Free Software. Free Software is great, but when you’re joining a Free Software social network, you don’t want to be the millionth guy posting about ArchLinux or Emacs every day. This is the quickest path of turning free social networks into ham radio (which is also great), where a bunch of boomers get on the radio and talk to each other about their radios.

Step two: Network

Find cool people. This is more difficult without an AlGoRiThM, but try out different hashtags (which you can also follow), dive into the local/federated feeds and try to find one or two people to follow at a time.

Step three: Engage

If you have a good bit or meme (or insight, even) that’s relevant, engage. Don’t be a reply-guy though. Don’t fall into the trap of just showing up in the mentions of the same 5 people every day. Never stop posting your own shit, even if it gets little engagement initially. No one will follow you when they are guaranteed to see your dogshit posts below the person they actually care about anyway. Follow back the people who follow you. When one of your posts really takes off and gets a lot of likes, look for the people who scrolled your profile and liked the shit you actually care about instead of whatever random meme that you got trending. Those people are your most powerful allies.

You get likes (and discovery) from making insightful replies, but you will only get follows if you are posting interesting stuff of your own.

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Probably a dumb question, but here goes: why does someone need followers? Do followers monetize you on a federated platform?

Seems to be by follow others, they always follow back even though my profile tells them they dont need to.

What’s the point of that? Does it improve your experience using the website at all? If anything, I’d prefer the opposite: a sizable number of people that are available for me to follow and post things relevant to my interests.