Why is Lemmy, with a tiny fraction of Mastodon's MAU, more fun than Mastodon?
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'm looking forward optimistically toward a future where either:
) mastopub isn't mentioned with respect to networking at all
) people stop conflating masto with #Fediverse - They are not the same.
technically, #Lemmy might be a percentage of some sort in terms of traffic by MAUs with respect to mastotron - but not really; because it's a percentage of some sort in terms of traffic by MAUs with respect to Fediverse, and more specifically, ActivityPub traffic - NOT masto! Unless of course, one wishes to compare a single platform against another, but then it would usually be framed differently, instead of "as if" masto was the network itself, which it is not - it's just an aging Fediverse platform slowly, yet incrementally being marginalized as a goto buzzword, due to it's predatory nature with respect to other, better, older, and more feature complete Fediverse platforms, Including those operating over diaspora*, Zot6, ActivityPub, OStatus, Etc.
Oh, why is it, that Lemmy feels more vibrant, active, lighthearted, and even more powerful than mastotron?
Seriously though @rimu , Don't you think it's about time for #PyFedi to have it's own #Fediverse account that we can subscribe to via RSS or folllow? People really like it. People are really impressed. People ARE NOT saying things like this about it:
> I don’t like that the easy install instructions are longer than this blog post. I don’t like that the build failed after ten minutes due to a missing dependency because they couldn’t check for it before starting. I don’t like that restarting the build literally restarted from crate zero and rebuilt everything. I don’t like that the build failed fifteen minutes later trying to compile lemmy-schema because it ran out of memory, so I had to add swap. I don’t like that the build failed again another twenty minutes later trying to link lemmy_server because I didn’t add enough swap. Come on, man.
So yah, we were discussing PyFedi in the Fediverse-City Matrix room, and clumping together notions such as how your following assertion here has found a relevance that other 'similar' so-called link aggregators have eschew:
> PieFed - a federated forum, similar to Lemmy but written in Python
And indeed, even at merely the first glance, it looks a heckuvalot (sic) more friendly than just link aggregation, the lines begin to blur even further when you take a look at the fast and friendly NodeBB, not too dissimilar, but not as lightweight as PyFedi - Wait! Are we supposed be calling it something else?#PieFed, perhaps? Are you undergoing a rebranding and just haven't renamed the git repo over at Codeberg yet?
Do please let us know :) Piefed has a lot of other FUN connotations, as both a play on words and also just falling off the tongue a little easier.
Yes back to the question of whether you feel it's the right time for your PyFedi project to launch its own Fediverse account - preferably, if I might be so bold as to suggest, NOT on a masto instance. After all, and like you said:
> Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
Indeed it does. I could recommend a couple of Good Mitra instances, put in a word for you on one of the dev's reference flagship intances, or Friendica is awesome too - very awesome, and unlike mastopub, it doesn't, "feel like a fucking funeral", lolz (as you sooo eloquently stated). It also interoperates seamlessly with and between Diaspora, Bluesky, Hubzilla/Zot, and the entire ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse. The Pleroma and Misskey family of forks have some nice offerings as well. I think a lot of people would find it refreshing if a new and refreshing federated forum/aggregator project with an enjoyable, clean and friendly feel had it's Fediverse presence somewhere other than a cemetery ;)
I predict a rapid rise in the deployment of #PyFedi instances. just look at the number of #Mbin deployments as/of late, and #Kbin before that - both are still enjoying accelerating adoption rates.
Yup! There's a lot of excitement and people are talking - thought you might like to know ;) And thank you for creating PieFed!
Like others have said, the community aspect of Lemmy allows me to follow things I enjoy, not people who may or may not post something I like. Additionally, even a simple algorithm that sorts content based on perceived relevancy makes it so I can see the stuff I want to see first (though someone did point out that that isn’t entirely fair, but the “New” sort does provide that experience).
Microblogging versus content aggregation with comments. Two different things that are technically similar enough to share a protocol.
On Masto, it’s more about being a person saying something into the ether. Lemmy is more about adding content to communities, subscribing to the ones you like, and then talking about it there.
And that’s why Reddit is still winning. It’s the only big social network that does that (aside from Lemmy). All the other big ones are people-centric (or business or whatever). It’s you subscribe to a person. On Reddit and Lemmy you subscribe to a topic.
This 100%>. It’s why Reddit is way more fun than Twitter. Twitter is like yelling into the void and sometimes the void yells back. It’s good for publishers and content creation, bad for real conversation. Reddit supports real threaded conversation with voting to highlight the good parts of the conversation.
The other thing is interest following. Twitter you have to follow people, and a person may be posting on things you have interest in and other things you have no interest in. Reddit you follow subjects, and you see good content regardless of who posts it.
Mastodon and Lemmy are just decentralized Twitter and Reddit.
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.
This isn’t my experience at all. Mastodon feels more or less exactly like Twitter-circa 2022 to me (just with fewer right-wing trolls) - still fun and vibrant and also informative.
Lemmy feels like a collection of weird freaks trying desperately to be cool. And don’t get me wrong, I’m one of them. But I would not call the vibe here “vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun” or certainly “powerful.”
There’s a reason that I’m not a Twitter, X or Mastodon user. I’m not that kind of person. I think they should hand out free methadone if you can prove you’re an X user.
Lemmy (and Reddit) is separated into distinct communities too. You can avoid certain areas easily.
The community separation also means it’s easier for a whole group of people to share the same space because you can post about 10 different topics and each other person will only see the specific ones they want by subscribing to just the communities they like, instead of seeing everything from each person they follow. I recognize like a few dozen frequent commenters here myself, and I don’t have to see them post about topics in not interested in because I just don’t go to those other communities, so I just see the overlap we all care about.
@bruhbeans RNG. Also "fun" is subjective. Some of it is just cultural too. Mastodon has a certain “vibe" that has persisted since its early days while Lemmy's vibe is more imported from the more fun/wild days of Reddit.
@bruhbeans I think people feel more uninhibited on a platform like Lemmy, Typically, when you post on Mastodon your post will show up in the timeline for everyone who follows you and if not Unlisted, in public timelines as well. There'slemmy-worldxposure for just responding to something simple and niche. In the lemmy-world, people follow communities and view threads, not individual accounts, so they aren't typically exposed to the random commentary people have.
Notifications are also more reddit-ish, only pinging the direct parent post/reply author, without bothering the whole thread, and people can go back to the thread for updates.
Navigation of comments is also better. So it’s easier to just post a simple joke, a quick comment, etc, and not accidentally annoy 50 different people.
And like reddit the post is treated as part of a community instead of a specific person’s timeline, which extends to how comments are treated too.
From my experience, Mastodon is limited by interaction being more limited. On Twitter, I used to have the luxury of not needing to always know who I wanted to interact with. I could follow 30 celebrities I was interested in, go to their posts and find a plethora of people to interact with about something I cared about. That got me started until I found corners of Twitter that I liked.
Here on lemmy, there’s a front page that’s bound to have something worthwhile.
Both are helped by instances. If you’re in the right instance for you, you already have an okay starting point.
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.
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