Solving Discovery With MastoFind
So you’ve just joined a Mastodon instance, now what? Everyone tells you to follow as many people as possible to get your feed going but who do you follow? You can look in the local feeds to see who’s posting on your instance and maybe find some interesting people. You can also look in the federated feed and see a firehose of content from around the fediverse, but its still really doesn’t solve the issue of discovering people to follow. There aren’t many simple or easy tools native to your server that allow you to drill down and find people interested in the same topics you are. There’s also no real way to search for people across instances and when you do find a candidate to follow, searching through posts is tedious and sometimes cumbersome. A new online tool called Mastofind attempts to solve these problems and others.
Discovery
Think of Mastofind as a search engine for Mastodon. Just as you’d go to Google to find web sites based on key words you can also search the Mastofind directory for accounts to follow. You can search accounts based on predefined topics that are continually evolving, hash tags or keywords. Once you find accounts matching your search you can browse profiles and posts allowing you to make the process of choosing who to follow a little more informed and a little less cumbersome.
Mastofind is an opt in service meaning Mastodon users apply to be listed to the platform meaning there are no bots crawling around the fediverse adding users unknowingly to the database. Every account on Mastofind wants to be discovered and is most likely looking for new users to connect with. Listing your profile on Mastofind can be enormously beneficial if you’re looking to add new followers to your profile or to increase your visibility in general. You can also list yourself as the key contact for an organization and be listed accordingly. Getting listed at Mastofind is great for increasing your discovery on Mastodon, but there are other features as well that solve a few other nagging issues with joining the fediverse.
Get Verified & See Verified Users
Mastofind not only provides a directory of searchable Mastodon profiles, it also provides a free verification service for users that list their profile and provide verification information to Mastofind. Verification is human verified and information collected is not used outside the verification process.
Mastodon Verification
Verified Mastofind users are displayed in the directory with a “verified” banner in their Mastofind listing and can display their verified url in their Mastodon profile as well.
Verification has always been a core feature of Mastodon and is possible without Mastofind, however it requires some basic technical knowledge and access to hosted web page. Mastofind simplifies and streamlines the process by allowing users to leverage the Mastofind site for Mastodon verification.
Search
Mastofind is a great resource for finding user profiles but it also provides a combined feed of all the listed profiles and allows you to search posts across instances. This is a great resource for finding posts between that would otherwise be searchable across instances. This solves a problem that’s plagued the distributed fediverse for some time.
Analytics, The Hidden Feature
A lot of people that list at Mastofind skip right by one of its most important features. Admittedly it’s not obvious to most users where to find it or how to access it, but it’s one of the most compelling features of this tool. To make use of the analytics feature you have to be listed and verified, once that’s complete go to the top right hand side of the screen, click on your avatar and the click profile. You’ll see your profile information, but you’ll also see a not so obvious tab, marked “Dashboard” . From there you’ll see a useful set of metrics including your most popular posts along with boost and like counts.
For bigger accounts it can take the crawler some time to process all the data, but once it’s done you get a pretty good snapshot of your engagement on Mastodon. This is the perfect tool if you’re trying to measure traffic driven to blogs, web sites or other media adjacent to the Fediverse.
Free As In Beer
The best part is that Mastofind is a free resource sponsored by TheCanadian.Social , and by donation. Listing on Mastofind and the verification service are free essential tools for your trip across the fediverse and the site itself becomes more useful with more listings. It’s a win-win that tries to solve one of the biggest problems with the fediverse, Discovery and Search, with some essential tools thrown in. Ease your experience on Mastodon and easily discover others while listing your own profile.
Mastofind can be found here: Mastofind.Net