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 honestly think the tiny fraction of MAU might be the reason. Something like once you exceed a Dunbar Number of contacts in a community it starts to go downhill.
Quality is higher when people want to be somewhere specific based on content or types of users and not because of the number of users.
Quality goes down when people are somewhere because everyone else is there.
The latter tends to have a higher proportion of malicious trolls and other people who crave conflict because they need a large enough crowd to get away with those kind of behaviors.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s true, I noticed on a couple subreddits that votes don’t matter unless you’re mildly popular, and it’s even possible to get comments throttled for being unpopular enough. Downvotes don’t do much besides pushing your comments off the screen for the most part.
I still don’t know how to find people with similar interests on mastodon. There may be lots of interesting stuff happening there but how would I know? Plus posting on there feels like shouting into the void since I only have a handful of followers.
Also I don’t want to follow randos who sometimes post about cool things, sometimes post the $50 hamburger they ate, and sometimes post unfiltered rampant misogyny, I want to follow cool ideas and topics directly.
If you're interested, follow hash tags not people. Well, you can follow people too if you find someone you vibe with. Also following groups can help … until someone forgets what 'reply all' means.
I share the same experience. Lemmy imitates Reddit, Mastodon imitates Twitter. The concept of Twitter might be more reliant on algorithms than that of Reddit, algorithms that Mastodon mostly lacks. Bluesky is a Twitter alternative designed for federation that has algorithms, and it appears more lively to me. The same might be true for Threads but I won’t test this out.
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