A next generation of follow-finders
People have been building different tools to help find interesting accounts to follow for a while now. Recently, multiple new follow-finders tools have been launched. I take a look at each of them, as well as some historic context.
Recently multiple new tools to find people to follow have launched. This is part of a more focused awareness of the need to improve the onboarding experience for new users, as well as improving the experience for current users. One of the side effects of not having algorithmic discovery on the fediverse is that content discovery is harder, and requires more active input from users. This mainly happens by putting in more effort in finding interesting accounts to follow.
Before the large inflow of new users that happened during the #twittermigration of November 2022, the main follow-finding tools were the popular FediFollows account (with the accompanying fedi.directory), and the directory on fediverse.info. The FediFollows account is still one of the most influential follow-finder tool, with its posts getting significant traction on the feeds.
For a while, people who migrated from Twitter towards Mastodon could use tools such as Movetodon to find people they follow on Twitter on Mastodon as well. However, with recent changes to the Twitter API these tools mostly do not work anymore. During the first wave of the #twittermigration in November 2022, people quickly started building some rudimentary tools as well, sometimes as simple as Excel files with lists on names on it (example), that people could use to find people that are worth following. These lists also turned into well-maintained databases, with the TrueSciPhi set the best example of this. This website covers Science, philosophy, and mathematics lists of accounts to follow.
Over time, new types of follow tools started to emerge, that used these files as a basis for an app that you can sign in to, allowing you to easily follow the people you want. One such an example is getstarted.social, that builds upon these earlier lists, and places them in an easy to read web format. The next iteration were tools that use your own social graph. Both Whom to Follow and Followgraph look at your "follows' follows" to suggest accounts that might be of interest to you.
Another generation of tools
Recently, the VerifiedX project has launched, which is the most notable of the new wave of follow-finding tools. It is created by the newsie.social admin team, and currently consists of Verifiedjournalist.org and Lawstodon.org. These tools provide discovery of new people to follow, but also function as a way to provide a form of verification to the people who have signed up to the service. It has even expanded beyond that, providing a feed that shows recent posts by people who are part of the directory. A more detailed write-up of the VerifiedX project can be found here.
SpreadMastodon is a new awareness raising campaign to get people to easily sign up to Mastodon. It is unaffiliated with the Mastodon organisation, and created by David Slifka and Tim Chambers, and one of the main goals is to help people with the onboarding process. Onboarding is often found to be confusing for newcomers, and the goal of the campaign is help this process. As part of the campaign, they set up an easy following tool on their website, where you can login, select a topic (or simply all topics), and it will automatically follow all the people in that topic for you. As part of making the onboarding as quickly as possible, you do not select individuals within the topic. The fediverse (and open-source software communities in general often as well) has traditionally a culture of tinkering and individual fine-tuning, where users make choices on as granular level as possible. It is interesting to see people take a different approach here, and focus on easy understanding and prevention of information overload.
Findmyfriends is a new tool that allows users to find your Mastodon followers on PixelFed. It is one of the first, if not the first of these kind of tools, that help you link your social graph between fediverse services. It works by trying to match your Mastodon friends list to people with the same name on PixelFed. This works, but gives a fair share of wrong suggestions. It seems likely that as other fediverse services get more popular, more of these kinds of tools will get made, that help you find people you know on other fediverse services. As the data is publicly available, and not locked behind paid APIs, this new Findmyfriends tool might just be the first of many.
Other initiatives with follow-finder tools are this list by Recknsense, and FediFollows. FediFollows is a curated list by Jorge Caballero that gives you 25+ topics, with each a handful of interesting accounts to follow. As with other tools, you can log in with your Mastodon account onto the tool for an easy 1-click follow. The Recknsense list makes use of the #befound hashtag, where it collects and documents posts that themselves have lists of people to follow. The idea behind this is that people are the best at finding other people, so it helps surfacing recommendations made by others.
