From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
I think it’s much easier to discover new content on Lemmy.
Mastodon feels like a torrent of random unrelated comments drowing out anything that might be interesting. I tried it, I don’t see any value in it. Even for following friends it’s unusable, there is the one that posts three times a day and the one that posts once every three weeks, there is no way to ever see one of his posts, unless I specifically go to his profile to look. I’ve given up on Mastodon.
So basically you’re saying that you would prefer the “recommendation” system, and not the Reverse-Chronological system. You would give up equality and fairness in posting, just so you could conveniently avoid 2 seconds of scrolling to find the posts down the line.
It’s the recommendation system that destroyed FB Pages, and Instagram for photographers and artists. Suddenly, the system found they were not worthy of recommending their posts. Careers were lost.
I personally avoid AI recommendation engines like the plague. Lemmy/Reddit’s voting system is as far as I go.
Those recommendation systems have lots of problems, I agree, especially if they optimize for monetary benefit of the platform above all else.
But you need them if you want to have interesting stuff recommended, simple as that. I can’t (and have no interest to) read every Mastodon post ever, same for Lemmy. And I admit it, I don’t even want to read every post my friends make.
It’s sorta like how we value Wikipedia, which curates information, but other enshittified for-profit curators of information are trash. I don’t want the trash, but I also don’t want no curation at all. I value good curation. And Wikipedia shows it is possible to have good, or at least not garbage, curation of content.
The interesting thing is Bluesky has 3rd party feed generators, and there exists one called “infrequent posters” or something similar and it’s run by one of the devs, it shows your chronological feed filtered down to just the people who post the least often.
They also have a ton of other feeds like a discover feed, a bunch of 3rd party feeds for topics like astronomy, photography feeds, etc. And a “for you” feed where the feed generator looks at your public interactions to guess your interests. You can pick and choose, or just stay chronological only. Or create your own feeds!
They’ve just launched 3rd party moderation labeling services too and limited federation is active (they’re testing how the moderation model will work in a federated network now before they open that up fully). They’re making the whole thing modular so you can pick and choose hosts, feeds, moderation, etc, from different sources and switch any of them whenever. Really interesting experiment and it seems to be working quite well.
Still only a Twitter-ish feed in the official bluesky implementation, but I’d like to see a forum like fork using this model with content addressing and all. “Forkable” and movable forums would be possible in this model.
So many posts perfectly summarising why I’ve always preferred the reddit format over twitter. On one you follow topics, on the other you follow people. I prefer to hear a wide range of views on one topic rather than one persons views on different topics.
You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. I find this a preferable experience to following individuals.
There’s a problem with that on smaller instances.
You can only see hashtags from people your instance already knows (someone follows them). On bigger, well-connected, instances this is not as problematic.
But, no matter the size of the instance, it just shows how even the “hashtag experience” depends on the “following experience”.
Even then, Mastodon and similars feel more like a market square with everyone trying to catch others’ attention, even when they’re all talking about a specific topic to “no one in particular”. It’s not as easy to follow a topic there as in a forum-style thread about the topic, like this one.
It’s not nearly the same as following communities or groups, it’s just a collection of posts grouped by tags, as opposed to a space where people discuss or post about a more broad topic. Also Communities and groups typically invite more interaction than simply tagging posts by virtue of being a place people post as opposed to simply being a post tag category.
I should note that there are groups on Mastodon (Not really in Mastodon itself but federated Group actors from other services show up there) though they are less intuitive and thus are usually overlooked by most Mastodon users.
Lemmy is working as interests based discussion platform and mastodon as gossip based. Interests are always better than people.
Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.
Can confirm. I can only think of few people to follow on mastodon, whereas on Lemmy, I can think of many topics to follow. Besides, on mastodon, those interesting people will also discuss boring topics from time to time.
On Lemmy, you can only focus on interesting topics, which means that your home feed will always be full of cool stuff.
This is getting a little euphoric
Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.
In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).
One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.
(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)
Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)
I’ve had limited experience with Akkoma and I personally love the early 2000s aesthetic, it’s also more feature complete and transparent to the end user than Mastodon (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives). I also experimented with Mastodon and noticed that whatever I posted on the akkoma instance couldn’t be seen while browsing from the mastodon instance: mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.
I might give it another try, look for a specific instance focused on something I’m interested in, even if just slightly, and try to blend in, instead of being the weird antisocial dude in the corner. No promises, tho.
mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.
I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)
(also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)
Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)
I prefer Lemmy over Mastodon for the same reason I preferred Reddit (pre-APIpocalypse) over Twitter (pre-Musk) - the ability to subscribe to specific communities with similar interests. Try as I might in Mastodon with selective subscriptions to certain posters I still find myself scrolling through stuff I have no interest in hoping for a nugget of interest.
Lemmy naturally concentrates unconnected users with similar interests thanks to reddit-style communities. Mastodon follows the Twitter style where you have to find and follow individual users to get their microblog content, and its harder to isolate certain topics or interests except across the entire service via hashtags. Individual users on their own are very uninteresting and bland.
Lemmy has fewer users but they as a whole generate more active content than Mastodon does thanks to community specialization, since the Twitter style posts require some critical mass of users following to generate interesting discussion (something that basically never happens unless you’re already a celebrity)To add to this, on Lemmy I often find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with a user depending on the topic and community. It adds a layer of additional context and nuance to that user. If I was just to follow the user vs. community, however, I may get the impression that the user is not worth following if I happen to run across them on a topic that we have disagreements on.
I’ve had times where i’ll have a negative interaction with someone on lemmy and see them later in another thread and they’re cool again. On Mastodon if you have a single bad experience you’ve probably already blocked each other and that chance to reconcile never comes up again.
because you touch yourself
It’s harder to find the good stuff on Mastodon because you have to follow individuals or novelty accounts.
I think that is the biggest issue with Mastodon and federation in general: Limited discoverability. I’ve spoken to a few artists that still post on Twitter. They won’t join Mastodon, because it is so hard to develop consistent reach.
The twitter format makes it feel like everyone is speaking from a soap box at all times, and people aren’t their best selves from a soap box.
With how block-heavy everyone is it feels less like a soapbox more like you’re shouting into an empty parking lot.
I need to follow specific users on Mastodon to tailor my experience. On Lemmy, I follow entire communities where people can engage, all grouped by posts. It feels way less chaotic.
I know I could follow tags on Mastodon, but IMO their discoverability is even worse than communities, and if someone decides to spam a tag with irrelevant content there’s not much I can do but to block the account.
With communities, there’s at least some moderation happening.
But then maybe it’s my own bias, I always preferred interacting on Reddit vs Twitter.
They don’t have beans on Mastodon.
They do have jeans tho
That is unfortunate.
Lemmy is and will forever remain pants optional.
I think you’re just in a weird corner of mastodon? My mastodon feed is way more popping than on here.
Plausible
Just guessing here, but Lemmy is generally content focused, where it feels like mastodon and twitter have more of a focus on the interaction between users. This would mean that Mastodon needs a lot of active users to function, where a lemmy community can be largely carried by just a few really active posters.
Up/downvotes help us all essentially be eachothers “algorithm” so its easier to find interesting stuff. Also comment sections are the best part of Lemmy style websites while mastodon is a mess to follow because the default app doesnt even have threaded replies, theres no downvotes, and you cant subscribe to a post to get notifications or come back to it later and posts dont appear on google searches so a post doesn’t get any use after a day or two. Lemmy posts bring me benefits months/years after theyre made because they appear when I google for information
Mastodon having a way bigger algorithm curve before you start seeing interesting stuff remains throughout.
