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.
You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. I find this a preferable experience to following individuals.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Wow phanpy is amazing! Thanks for sharing!
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.
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.
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.
Interesting people don't post about their breakfast though
The difference is mastadon is how interesting your friends are. Lenny is how interesting the entire lemmy populous is.
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
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.
Yep, two different models of social networking, I personally prefer the Lemmy model.
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.
Also awful for creating a community I feel
I very much agree.
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.
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.
Sounds fun
It's harder to find the good stuff on Mastodon because you have to follow individuals or novelty accounts.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Because both of us are here! And we are fun people, won't you agree?
Just kidding!
Cheers, have fun.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure Mastodon has algorithms. All internet infrastructure runs on algorithms, except for weird experimental AI stuff.
Everything I’ve seen on Mastodon is either very serious or cat pics. There’s also this dungeons and dragons AI game that I sometimes get sucked into.
Because you’re 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 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.
Like others have said, the community aspect of Lemmy allows me to follow things I enjoy, not people who may or may not post something I like. Additionally, even a simple algorithm that sorts content based on perceived relevancy makes it so I can see the stuff I want to see first (though someone did point out that that isn't entirely fair, but the "New" sort does provide that experience).
I'm always surprised at the lack of interactions on Mastadon. Most toots seem to never get a single like or comment, even from users with lots of followers. Always makes me feel like I'm missing something.
Mastodon just doesn't have any users compared to Lemmy I guess.
I think you’re just in a weird corner of mastodon? My mastodon feed is way more popping than on here.
Plausible
Lemmy is working as interests based discussion platform and mastodon as gossip based. Interests are always better than people.
Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.
This is getting a little euphoric
Can confirm. I can only think of few people to follow on mastodon, whereas on Lemmy, I can think of many topics to follow. Besides, on mastodon, those interesting people will also discuss boring topics from time to time.
On Lemmy, you can only focus on interesting topics, which means that your home feed will always be full of cool stuff.
@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.
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.
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.
Because Twitter-like services are not fun.... I never thought they were fun. :)
They were fun after Tumblr shut down if you know what I mean.
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.
I think it's much easier to discover new content on Lemmy.
This isn't my experience at all. Mastodon feels more or less exactly like Twitter-circa 2022 to me (just with fewer right-wing trolls) - still fun and vibrant and also informative.
Lemmy feels like a collection of weird freaks trying desperately to be cool. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of them. But I would not call the vibe here "vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun" or certainly "powerful."
One of us! One of us!
Literally I have no idea what you are talking about...
ya wanna know what my feed has been all day over on mastodon...
gay people tooting ":3" and just that, hundreds of them.. ddos the fedi with ":3"...
you see what you follow, follow cooler people. It's not mastodon it's a you problem. Should follow more gay and trans and neurodivrergent furries. It's a party over there every day I love it
Honestly, I need more :3 in my life.
:3
My expirience is similar, I prefer Lemmy but I see the potential of platform like Mastodon or Misskey or Pixelfeld for interraction with artists. In that sense you can use list to properly organize your feed and don't clog your timeline feed. Plus for discovering new people you follow hashtags and some instances let you set up antennas to catch post with specific words (iceshrimp rules!).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Try following George Takei, Star Trek Minus Context, and/or the various cat accounts, e.g Cats of Yore.
@bruhbeans RNG. Also "fun" is subjective. Some of it is just cultural too. Mastodon has a certain “vibe" that has persisted since its early days while Lemmy's vibe is more imported from the more fun/wild days of Reddit.
Plenty of reasons already shared, I just want to add that I felt (still feel) the same about Reddit vs Twitter.
Mastodon users hates ice cream, that's all you need to know.
Maybe it is the...
You go into All feed and despite your language being set to only English it's just a massive wall of Japanese text. Lemmy has the decency to automatically tag posts the language that it probably is. Mastodon requires you go out of your way to set your language, and apparently a lot of Japanese and German speaking "How to set up Mastodon" guides are skipping over that important detail.
Another problem is that hashtags are abysmal at context. I want to see some bootyholes, no I do not want to see Greg's hairy Italian ass nor do I want to hear people ranting about how their least favorite politician is a total jerk, and I SURE AS HELL DONT WANT TO SEE "barely legal" shit thank GOD for hashtag blocking!!! Being able to subscribe to hashtags is great but it needs a basic filtering system on a hash-tag level.
There's also the problem that the only people who hashtag properly are the bots, so your feed is like 90% bots. Hashtags just suck and it's ridiculous that mastodon didn't learn from twitter phasing them out as a focus and basically recreated early twitter without the algorithms.
It also has shitposting!
because you touch yourself
Why is a smaller community more fun than a bigger community?
Because the difficulty of not offending people increases as the number and cultural range of people changes.
A small group is easier to get comfortable with than a larger group.
I think it depends on the instance you're using. The one I'm on is very active. 🤷