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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
I am similar. I tolerated the Twitter style user interface but never used it a whole lot and so therefore my mastodon interactions were limited. Since i have been on Lemmy, total game-changer imo. I have thunder as a swipe directly from my home screen and use it quite often.
Yeah agree, I keep trying it myself but its just weird in its layout. Just recently found this webclient, phanpy, that at least puts the longer posts together in a thread. Game-changer, but I am still not sure why the character limit still exists. Also no sorting options of incoming content or am I missing something? I guess it just doesn’t work that way.
I personally would rather follow topics than people. I don’t know or care what the founder of Adobe had for breakfast. I like the idea of community aggregate voting to drive an interesting feed. Maybe Mastodon can do that better than I know because I only gave it a few days… but I was nowhere near what I wanted after a few days where Lemmy was good from day 0.
Except the people who are actually popular on mastodon are shit posting the windows xp USB connection sounds and meowing at each other like feral cats. not the founder of adobe
This is a lie. In nature, cats only meow as kittens and grow out of it with adulthood. Adult meowing exists for the express purpose of communicating with humans. So feral cats, if they be adults, would not meow.
There are no shortage of creative or funny people on Mastodon, however, Mastodon’s feed algorithm do not allow them to be discovered unless you happen to stumble upon them by happenstance, whereas it is quite easy to be seen on Lemmy by posting good content: it’s rare when I don’t get any upvotes or downvotes on a comment here, and good replies are fairly common, so the interaction quality here is generally higher.
“American actress Jaime Presley from North Carolina” is one of my more successful characters, all I had to do was a Southern American accent and people think I’m a completely different person.
Then again, nobody ever expects an actress to be playing the role of another actress.
That show was a masterpiece that literally nobody talks about. They did the impossible of making a flawed cast that wasn’t just full of awful people who the writers desperately try to make you like (often through justifying extremely problematically) Their flaws are a key part of their characters, but don’t define them as a character. It also allows them to organically go back on continuity shifts, because in the real world change isn’t either instant or not at all, it’s a cycle of diminishing relapses and rebounds. The ups and downs make for great content.
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 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.
Mastodon is just a bunch of news articles and people talking like robots. I try to engage and there’s fucking nothing I care about. Anything actually interesting is like half a thought. Like they started talking about a topic but didn’t get to the point before they decided to hit post. Posts from popular accounts talk about electoral politics in a weird clipped manner like a newspaper but even more boring.
Most of the instances have a 500 character limit per post, so that’s going to limit conversation. The platform experience is also heavily dependent on the people and hashtags you follow. My Mastodon feed is mostly pictures of wildlife and flowers and shit.
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)
Mastodon went in two seriously wrong directions, but seems to remedy them which is difficult. First they have no proper quote supporting and failing to realize all communication works this way on the internet. Be it comments on articles, all the newspapers quoting others and thus creating those articles etc. Second the lack of algorithms due to a misguided opinion they are inherently evil. What we got instead is a random feed of random messages where a news like structure like on Twitter is not possible. Extremely important events are buried behind tons of crappy posts. And the only region for whom the explore tab is working is America as nothing is localized. Also scrolling through the feed doesn’t tell you what seems to garner attraction by the number of comments. So most clicks are wasted on deadend topics.
So what would be the solution as I believe many fedinautes and mastonautes agree on the fact that the way traditional social network did their algorithms is bad. Should the community develop a new kind of algorithm? Or a functionality to build your own?
It stems from a somewhat reactionary (in a “I don’t want chemicals in my food” way) prospective where they knew the outcome of algorithms was bad but didn’t understand why it was bad. Now they have their own algorithm and it’s repeating a lot of the same mistakes.
And the only region for whom the explore tab is working is America as nothing is localized.
Explore tab is sorted by language, not by region, so it works too for any sufficiently large foreign language country (Spain/Latin America, Portugal/Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan).
I wish Mastodon implemented Akkoma-style bubbles of related instances, which would allow to create, like, Explore tab but only from (manually selected) several Australian instances.
Twitter has two tabs, one with and the other one with less algorithms, Mastodon should do that as well. The discussion is about improving it and Bluesky is in its infancy.
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.
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