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.
Generally you post onto the public “federated” timeline. With Mastodon this timeline contains posts from many different Mastodon servers that are all federated with each other, but it appears as one single timeline.
Hashtags are really central to the Mastodon experience. There is no algorithm that automatically suggests posts and accounts like on mainstream centralized services. Instead you gotta purposely use hashtags to discover posts and people. Add descriptive hashtags to your posts, the more the better. This helps people searching for specific topics find your posts.
You can follow people and they can follow you. Posts from people you follow will appear on your home feed. You can also follow hashtags and posts containing those hashtags will appear in your home feed. At the moment there’s no official support for communities like with Lemmy; following hashtags on topics you like is the closest you can get to that functionality. (You can also make separate lists of hashtags outside of your home feed).
The people and interests on Mastodon has a lot of overlap with Lemmy.
Here are a couple of resources you might find helpful: https://fedi.tips/ https://fedi.directory/