From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
Mastodon feels like a torrent of random unrelated comments drowing out anything that might be interesting. I tried it, I don’t see any value in it. Even for following friends it’s unusable, there is the one that posts three times a day and the one that posts once every three weeks, there is no way to ever see one of his posts, unless I specifically go to his profile to look. I’ve given up on Mastodon.
So basically you’re saying that you would prefer the “recommendation” system, and not the Reverse-Chronological system. You would give up equality and fairness in posting, just so you could conveniently avoid 2 seconds of scrolling to find the posts down the line.
It’s the recommendation system that destroyed FB Pages, and Instagram for photographers and artists. Suddenly, the system found they were not worthy of recommending their posts. Careers were lost.
I personally avoid AI recommendation engines like the plague. Lemmy/Reddit’s voting system is as far as I go.
Those recommendation systems have lots of problems, I agree, especially if they optimize for monetary benefit of the platform above all else.
But you need them if you want to have interesting stuff recommended, simple as that. I can’t (and have no interest to) read every Mastodon post ever, same for Lemmy. And I admit it, I don’t even want to read every post my friends make.
It’s sorta like how we value Wikipedia, which curates information, but other enshittified for-profit curators of information are trash. I don’t want the trash, but I also don’t want no curation at all. I value good curation. And Wikipedia shows it is possible to have good, or at least not garbage, curation of content.
The interesting thing is Bluesky has 3rd party feed generators, and there exists one called “infrequent posters” or something similar and it’s run by one of the devs, it shows your chronological feed filtered down to just the people who post the least often.
They also have a ton of other feeds like a discover feed, a bunch of 3rd party feeds for topics like astronomy, photography feeds, etc. And a “for you” feed where the feed generator looks at your public interactions to guess your interests. You can pick and choose, or just stay chronological only. Or create your own feeds!
They’ve just launched 3rd party moderation labeling services too and limited federation is active (they’re testing how the moderation model will work in a federated network now before they open that up fully). They’re making the whole thing modular so you can pick and choose hosts, feeds, moderation, etc, from different sources and switch any of them whenever. Really interesting experiment and it seems to be working quite well.
Still only a Twitter-ish feed in the official bluesky implementation, but I’d like to see a forum like fork using this model with content addressing and all. “Forkable” and movable forums would be possible in this model.
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 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.
The twitter format makes it feel like everyone is speaking from a soap box at all times, and people aren’t their best selves from a soap box.
With how block-heavy everyone is it feels less like a soapbox more like you’re shouting into an empty parking lot.
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.
They don’t have beans on Mastodon.
That is unfortunate.
Lemmy is and will forever remain pants optional.
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 you’re just in a weird corner of mastodon? My mastodon feed is way more popping than on here.
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
Mastodon having a way bigger algorithm curve before you start seeing interesting stuff remains throughout.
I believe it’s how the data is structured.
Lemmy is focused on themes and topics, with the “user” not being the focus (you can’t even follow a user on Lemmy).
That’s reversed on Mastodon, with focus on the users you follow, and the topics (hashtags, groups, etc) being optional.
For some people, Lemmy is better, for others, Mastodon or other microblog platform. The fact that both can exist in the same network is magical to me.
Maybe it is the…
I think it’s the gamification. Mastodon degamifies Twitter in a way Lemmy can’t really do with the classic Reddit system.
Votes go up, votes go down, you can see people winning and losing here. It’s fun, even if it’s in a bad way.
I like how votes have no sway in moderating and discoverability. It keeps people honest instead of just trying to game the system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
