Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I’m not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I’m supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I’m one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
It’s just a different way to browse current topics that people are discussing. You can follow famous/not famous people, news people, musicians, artists, scientists and so on. You have to take some time to search by name or a hashtag like #music that is interesting for you and then follow those. They typically lead to more people and hashtags of interest that you can follow to build a more personal feed. It’s just a different way to curate the various things that interest you.
The thing is that it’s just another option for people to interact like lemmy/reddit twitter/mastodon pixelfed/facebook etc. Obviously the less popular options have less niche interests. Journalists see that these options can’t be used the same way, and need some work to figure out and navigate, so they critique the different and less polished things they see. If they don’t have what you are looking for, maybe check back in 3-6 months when there are more users and activities. Like lemmy, things are changing quickly right now.