Mastodon is regarded as social network for *nerds *just like the rest of services based on ActivityPub. Where are those nerds? I want to find my community.
Most popular posts on mastodon.social’s Explore wall currently have from 3 to 8 replies and with two exceptions: one political post which has 11 and some long discussion in blender artist community which has 41 replies right now. Everything else is just hiking, cats and motivational quotes for gen-x and milennials.
Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.
You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.
The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.
As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).
Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.