What is interesting about lemmy is that you can start a thread on a different server. You can't follow people on lemmy, just communities. It seems that this model results in a network with topics are a central feature whereas on Mastodon the central feature is the individual account.
I've always found the microverse(mastodon) to be a poor place for discussions; they tend to be way to disjointed, spread out.
The character limit on posts on most Mastodon servers also results in people limiting..