Some quick advise for new Me.dm users

Medium’s Mastodon instance seems to be on a roll, with 8.9k new accounts as I write this. I had a quick look at the recent profiles, and here’s a bit of advise based on what I saw:

Medium auto-adds your blog’s address to your profile and helps you put up a short bio. That’s cool. However, it doesn’t onboard you to intro yourself to other people, nor discover people to follow — and the way Mastodon works, you won’t see anything unless you follow others. In order to get out of the ghost town, do these steps:

1. Write a post (toot) introducing yourself and add the #introduction hashtag to it. Pin it to your profile. Other people expect to see one of these and it helps them understand who to follow. Assuming you do want followers, this’ll be important.
2. Be very liberal about who to follow yourself. Find your favorite authors (many of whom won’t be on @me.dm as they may have joined another server instead) and give them a follow. Take a look at the Explore view and find some interesting people. If you make mistakes, it’s easy enough to unfollow people later!
3. Perhaps you have a particular topic you’re interested about. On Mastodon, you can follow topics by their hashtags. Take a look at explore/tags and follow some there.

It’s better to go a little overboard with too many follows in the beginning, as that will keep your timeline fresh. You’ll soon notice there’s plenty of interesting content and conversation going on.

If you want to follow me, it’s better you do that at @osma@mas.to than by my me.dm profile.