From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
Because you’re here.
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.
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.
Hard agree on the algorithm point.
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I would love for some interoperable interface with a few default choices and then the option to load customized open source options!
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.
The chemicals analogy is actually pretty genius!
We’ve all seen a “I don’t want chemicals in my food” reactionary. They’re not racist or anything just fueled more by anger than by principal.
I’m pretty sure Mastodon has algorithms. All internet infrastructure runs on algorithms, except for weird experimental AI stuff.
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.
That wasn’t clear to me by the UI and I didn’t see the easy switch option.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
Mastodon is basically just a bunch of guilty liberals who feel bad that their baby had became a nazi, but are not willing to take the steps necessary to grow from there. Lemmy comes from redditors who saw the platform as always being full of overt displays of nazism and thus were able to appropriately grow from the experience and free themselves from its influence.
When you look back at your reddit days you are ashamed, because you now know why it was wrong. When mastodon users look back at twitter they reminisce with fondness of their times hanging out with war criminals and retweeting right wing sources that agreed with them.
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.
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.
Interesting people don’t post about their breakfast though
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.
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 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.
because everyone else is there.
There are at least 10 bigger social networks, so we’re probably good for at least another year.
I think it depends on the instance you’re using. The one I’m on is very active. 🤷
The main factor is discoverability.
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.
Oh, hey, I loved you in My Name is Earl
“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.
i’d like to unify them in one app so one can make the other more discoverable and connected
I find the microblog model to be fairly limiting. It’s good for posting quips, memes, and news, but it’s terrible for having any sort of a meaningful interactions. A forum like Lemmy facilitates much more interesting discussions.
Exactly. I often post walls of text, and it is probably because it takes me a lot of words to express ideas in English, but I also feel like I cannot discuss something deeply in whatever number of characters are admitted now on microblogging. Forums and such are great and I love reading long posts and comments. Also, I get lost in who is replying to what on those sites, but here it is literally linear!
For sure, it’s basically impossible to have any serious conversations without threads.
Also awful for creating a community I feel
I very much agree.
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.
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.
