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)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.
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.
I always hated the Twitter format, so Mastodon never appealed to me in the first place
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you’re just in a weird corner of mastodon? My mastodon feed is way more popping than on here.
Because Twitter-like services are not fun.... I never thought they were fun. :)
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.
Try following George Takei, Star Trek Minus Context, and/or the various cat accounts, e.g Cats of Yore.
