So I made a Pixelfed account, and there seems to be a lot of slop/bot accounts. The posts in languages other than English don't bother me, just have been muting them as they come up as I'm a dirty monolingual. There are so few accounts where people post photos of themselves which sketches me out a little, lots of photography accounts with a SHIT TON of posts but 0 engagement. What has been yalls experience with the wider Fediverse, and do you have any recommendations for how to go about curating my algorithm? From what I've seen the Fediverse as a whole supposedly has 20 million users, Lemmy has been my main form of social media since the Reddit API debacle, though I haven't touched the rest of the Fediverse. There seems to be a lot more engagement here with quality posts/discussions, and we only have 50,000 active users. Is it worth going through the slog on the global feed on Pixelfed to find users I'm interested in, if so what's the best way to go about that?
Some things just don't federate well across services. Here on the threadiverse we can all see each other's upvotes and downvotes. However Lemmy users can't see the likes/boosts of Mastodon users. Mbin/Kbin users can see boosts though.
On the other side, Mastodon users can't see the upvotes/downvotes of Threadiverse users, or even their own upvotes/downvotes that they may have received from the Threadiverse.
So, while the fediverse as a whole may have 20 million users, sometimes the more common way that people engage is by simply liking/boosting/voting something. That information isn't always supported by different services and it may look a little emptier than it actually is.
Engagement on the Threadiverse may be a bit easier, because all you need to do is find a popular community and post in it.
Engagement on the other side of the fence is usually found by following a popular hashtag, or mentioning users with a large following. They can still create posts in Threadiverse communities as well, but that's not the typical route that they're used to.