So I’ve tried Mastodon a couple times now and so far it simply doesn’t click. Which is fine, it doesn’t have to. But I’m thinking maybe I just don’t know how to navigate the platform yet. Is it as interactive as Lemmy or is everyone kinda shouting into the void? Is there an equivalent to communities? If not, how do you find stuff you care about? And is reblogging the equivalent to upvoting? Is it like a like and share in one? Do they have memes there or what’s the range of content? How does it compare to bluesky? I have used bluesky but the tone there is kinda shallow imo, rarely any meaningful interactions. I’m Gen Z so maybe I’m just not the target audience? But Idk how much that even matters.
I’d say it’s a somewhat different kind of interactivity than Lemmy. Your typical Mastodon user won’t have many followers, but that doesn’t mean you’re “shouting into the void”. Similar to Lemmy, you can comment on (reply to) others’ posts and lots of other people can join in the discussion that way.
Not really, but you can follow hashtags for whatever topics you’re interested in. Or follow an account for something you’re interested in (e.g.: organizations, weather, hobby news, content creators, etc)
Follow people/organizations/tags that you find interesting and their posts will populate your feed.
Not necessarily. Reblogging (“boosting” on Mastodon) is just putting more eyes on someone else’s post by sharing it; it isn’t equivalent to an endorsement per se. You can favorite posts on Mastodon, but I don’t think there’s really an equivalent to a “like” or “upvote” button.
The range of content is as wide as anywhere else, memes and all. Can vary from instance to instance, though. (e.g.: code of conduct on mastodon.social may be different from fosstodon.org’s)
I haven’t used bluesky, so I can’t comment on this one.