I'm on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.

I've heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter...uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, "it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use". At least, that's what I've heard. Never verified this myself.

Tusky is definitely decent though.

No one is going to feed you content. It's a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.

But you gotta bootstrap it. There's a lot of interesting people and content in it.

There's a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.

There's hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.

I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it's so worth it and rewarding. So, don't quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It's a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.

And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.

So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.

Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don't follow, on the topics you have an interest in.

Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.

I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can't stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.

It's fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That's all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.

Another good account to follow is @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services (https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows) They highlight interesting accounts to follow.

I search tags, and if someone posts something interesting under a tag I like, I'll check their page out.

Like the other user said following tags is a great way to engage with things you choose. Along the way, you'll find people that you find interesting and then you can follow them directly. It's much less about seeking people and more letting them come to you.

No idea. I mainly follow tags lol

No. Lemmy and Mastodon federate using the ActivityPub protocol, but that's not good enough for making mobile apps or other clients. They each have their own API for their apps and an app made for one federated platform won't be able to log into another platform's server/instance.

All your interaction with the Fediverse is done through your instance.