1y ago

Seeing how good Lemmy is makes me frustrated with Mastodon

My Problems with Mastodon

Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.

These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.

Likes aren't counted by users outside your instance, and replies don't seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:
This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you'll see are your own.
There's really only one effective ways to find popular or 'trending' posts. There's the explore tab which has 'posts', and 'tags' sections. The 'posts' section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it's federated with, this is the one I use it the most. The 'tags' section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it's reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn't a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag! The 'Local' and 'Federated' tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don't warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
The search bar basically doesn't work, is this just me???
This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user's follows, you'll only see the one's on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn't apply to followers.

From what I've heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn't find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).

Why this is a Problem

Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It's not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.

In my eyes, Mastodon's one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren't design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.

As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.

175 comments

Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it's not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.
As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.
As long as he doesn't submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it's not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
- I'd be surprised if he did submit it as activitypub, he's already called it ATProtocol
  
  He cannot just call something the name of an industry standard but he can submit his to the W3C who then can decide whether to adopt it or not
- As long as he doesn't submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it's not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.
  If they get their act together and publish a real protocol / standard that a developer can read, implement, and then have a server capable of federating, then activitypub 1.0 can diaf and we can all praise our new activitypub 2.0 overlords.
- I only found firefish the other day but 'like Mastodon but cool" is a perfect way to describe it.

Mastodon doesn't have Likes at all.
The star you're referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.
- Oh god, Ive been using them wrong this whole time?!?!
  I guess I am so used to other social media I had assumed it was a like button.
  
  Although they differ from Twitter Likes, note that Mastodon Favorites are not private. For an example, I'll refer to one of your toots:
  https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356
  Viewing it in the Mastodon web interface, I see an indication that 2 people marked it as a Favorite. I can then click to see those 2 usernames, listed here:
  https://mastodon.social/@justhach/110696151311920356/favourites
  Such listings are limited though. For example, I'm viewing a toot that you boosted, and I see an indication that it has been marked as a Favorite by 816 users; but when I click to view their names, I see only 40 of them listed.
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  No, you haven't. It started out this way, but now basically it's the "tell the poster you acknowledge/like the post" but also there when you don't want to boost the post to your timeline. You can still use it this way, but because the community (probably with one of the first twitter exoduses) started using it more like a like on twitter, they gave up and implemented bookmarks (I think might be private and not notify the poster you've bookmarked?)
  Ofc, there are also some of the mastodon HOA that will still insist this, but then why do bookmarks exist...?
  Anyway, just in general, you can tell by the up/down ratio and a lot of the comments that are getting upvoted in this thread that are posting things that are either just incorrect or at least misunderstand things how many people in this thread actually use mastodon, so I would take criticism with a grain of salt.
- I don't see it that way. There are separate options to Favourite or Bookmark a post. To me Bookmarking something is so you can refer to it later, although nothing is stopping you using Favourites that way.
  
  Favourites get put on a list so you can refer to it later ... and notify the poster that you've done so as a form of positive feedback.
  Bookmarks get put on a list so you can refer to it later.
  That's the big difference.
  
  Favourite and Bookmark are absolutely different things. They're two different lists for you to use as you see fit.
  \ Neither of them is a Like though. I'm not sure that fact is really debatable.
- lol, and I was thinking I was supporting other's users opinions.
  
  You are in a way. Just not only that.

I think fundamentally Mastodon can't work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can't do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.
Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don't care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn't need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy's decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn't have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.
- The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone
  Nothing about Mastodon or the fediverse prevents this. In fact government institutions are already using the fediverse this way: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission https://social.overheid.nl/@belastingdienst There's some companies who run their own instances also, and no shortage of individuals running single-user instances as a subdomain of the same website they use for their professional brand.
  Decentralized =/= Federated. In a federated model, data is still siloed in 24/7 servers that are controlled by people or institutions.
- I think it's not that Mastodon couldn't do it, it's that it will end up just being an essentially centralized instance as people will want to be in the same instance as the people/companies they want to follow. How users would want to use Mastodon is counter-intuitive to how the fediverse should work. Lemmy is focused on content (posts and comments) which means there's less somebody to follow and the focus is on the communities.
  
  This is a semi serious question - do people not realize that you can follow across instances and it makes literally no difference?
  This is the one reason why some of us were sort of hoping that Threads would federate. Because the celebs and other normies are likely to gravitate there, and there are a few that some of us would still like to follow/interact with.
  If anything, this is my criticism against the way that Lemmy handles this. For example, my previous reddit habit was to follow a bunch of subs for TV shows that I watched. So last night when I was watching ST: Strange New Worlds, I really didn't enjoy the experience of digging through 10 communities that each had the episode posts with the same 15 comments, and the occasional new thought. This isn't even a criticism of the posters, if you came to the comments there would be some things that would be wild not to call out. I think ultimately I'd almost rather see the federation model for reddit-like services move down in the stack, and federate the communities rather than the whole instance. EG: there is a major ST collective community assimilating the smaller ones and becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Of course, this is also probably partially just because Lemmy/Kbin are still in their infancy, and I have a feeling that as time goes, things are more or less going to centralize in this way anyway, in the same way you could have multiple subs on reddit, but there was usually 1-2 big ones at most.
  This isn't a problem for mastodon, because when someone like Jeri Ryan joins, it doesn't matter on what instance, I can still follow her in one place, see who she follows and follows her for other like-minded individuals, see all of her posts and re-posts, etc. What instance you're on makes very little difference after the first five minutes or so and you're acquainted with how it works.

Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.
Turns out it was just a software quirk.

I think you have to factor in the ideological motivation here. Many have tried to criticise the team for being socialists or weaponise it as a means of trying to get Lemmy not to take off, but I argue that it is because Lemmy is run by ideologically committed people that it exceeded your expectations.
Lemmy's goal is disrupting corporate control of what used to be communal spaces online. This is ideologically motivated by the socialist beliefs held by its development team.
Whether you agree with socialists or not politically, for a platform like Lemmy this motivation is very very powerful and plays a significant part.
The other side of this is that having known and occupied socialist spaces with Dessalines for close to a decade now he is one of the hardest working socialists online.

This isn't just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances
It doesn't look like this anymore on mastodon.social
Search isn't free so it's up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.
It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn't free.
- Search isn’t free
  This isn't the primary reason most Mastodon servers lack full text search. Gargron is opposed to its inclusion in Mastodon because he believes it results in harmful social dynamics.
  Implementing Elasticsearch, which Mastodon has some support for is somewhat resource-intensive, and making it available for all posts a user is able to view takes a code change (there's a patch). A text search using PostgreSQL's built-in text search is not very resource-intensive, and implementing that is about a dozen lines of code.

So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?
- Hi from lemm.ee👋
- Indeed, at least that's the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.
- That's the idea, but in practice since the data exists independently on each server, it takes network time and computational time for them to align. In practice I expect comments to function as you expect, and upvotes to be slightly off depending on which instance you're viewing from.
  Things get a bit more weird when an instance gets defederated from another instance. My understanding here is that if you have instance A defederate from instance B, but instance B was listening to some of instance A's communities, that instance B will have an independent replica of that community that doesn't sync (this happened when beehaw defederated from open registration instances like lemmy.world).
- My understanding is yes, but only if the instances have federated with each other.
- Hello from feddit.de 👋
- Hello from kbin.social 👋
- It's aboot time something worked so well innit?
  -lemmy.ca
- Yes, on my instance for example your comment has 10 upvotes and 7 replies - the same counts are reflected on the origin instance lemmy.world.
- sh.itjust.works user here :)
- Hi from feddit.nl 🙌!
- Hello from zerobytes.monster 👋

Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.
So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it's external focus.

I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.
I don't care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.
I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.
I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing
I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.
My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).

Hear hear! I thought I didn't like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. "Oh, I can't view other instances' local timelines without making accounts on them? What's even the point of federation then?" But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it's not the fediverse's fault, Mastodon just doesn't have a clear audience.
And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon's features are "privacy-focused", but I think it does TOO good a job, it's so private that you can't find anything!

I think this is very much a YMMV situation. I moved from twitter to mastodon and brands aside, all of the interesting people I followed are here. granted, I follow a very developer centric crowd so it might be a bit self-selecting. I am enjoying Mastodon way more than twitter and I get more engagement on average.
- I'm having a similar experience. Almost all developers (mostly Python/Django) I was following on Twitter are on Mastodon and being able to follow hashtags is great. The servers are stable and I kept the very first android client I tried (Tusky).
  
  I'm a nerdy white guy that I'm guessing follows similar circles, and I also haven't really had trouble finding a community there, but tbf I don't think it's just exclusive to this demo either. Someone up somewhere in this thread said that mastodon is more hostile to LGBTQ, and that doesn't match what I've seen at all. I mean, my timeline through no real effort on my part is way gayer than it ever was on twitter, and I follow a lot more queer people than I did on twitter and they're usually posting how much they prefer mastodon to twitter.
  That said, I have seen POC saying that mastodon is a lot whiter and a lot more hostile, so idk. I've definitely noticed that the POC I followed on twitter really haven't come over. I really don't know what to ascribe that to. On twitter, I saw casual racism like all of the time even as a white dude, and only like a couple of times on mastodon. I mean, I'm not disagreeing because the few POC I am following have echoed this sentiment so idk what's actually going on, but yeah, I do think this is a very YMMV situation.

Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have

This post was at the top of Mastodon's explore page yesterday: https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843
I feel it perfectly encapsulates the issues I see others and I face with Mastodon. Since it was #1 trending, it probably resonated with many more too.
The technical issues can eventually solved. The cultural ones? That's the big question.
Lemmy seems far more approachable. It has its issues, but at least it has a working search.

> Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It’s not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.
Basically this all over.
IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine ... that's how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.
The way I've put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn't work too well for many people. It's neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who's looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don't see the point. In many ways, it's the white/western suburbia of social media ... and while that's a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there's a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.
On top of all that, it's actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).
The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.
There's firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called Clips which are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).

There's Akkoma
Then there's Lemmy and kbin.
- And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).
  I guess it must not be as bad as you make it out to be then?
  
  Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can't be that bad then!
  
  something being popular doesn't mean it's good
  
  It’s older

Yoo, people who say "oh my, mastodon doesn't have likes and algo and that's what makes it perfect", are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don't sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative
- It almost feels like a generational difference. People who grew up before algorithms are used to curating everything they see, and see algorithms as a failing of the internet.
  Those of us who grew up with algorithms enjoy good ones that promote content we really do want to see. The problem is that the really effective algorithms that benefit most of us also are the same ones that push right wing rhetoric because it’s successful.
  I’m personally a fan of a good algorithm because I like seeing new stuff. The pre-2016 YouTube was a good example. Promoted stuff that I wanted to watch almost all the time, found a lot of new content that way
  
  I don't see why having chronological feeds can't be paired with some more generic sorting or filtering systems. Nobody would be obligated to use either, you could just pick the one you want.
  I get people want to see specifically what they subscribe to, and nothing else (looking at you, facebook). But I don't see why people hate the idea of others being able to discover new content. Reddit had default subs for a long time, Twitter has trending topics, Mastodon could really do with something similar to help noobs get on-boarded.
  And no - there's no way I'm wading through the shit fountain that is Mastodon's all posts tab on the off chance I find one interesting post. If you don't already have interesting follows then it feels like there's no point.
  
  Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn't have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop "information bubbles," which would be much better than what they have now.
  
  I'm pretty sure this is it. I think mastodon leans more towards the olds (I'm ~40) in part because we did not like algorithm driven engagement, at least not as the primary vehicle, and most especially in the way that modern services do it. Like, great, I'm glad a celeb did a thing or a team won, but this is entirely irrelevant to my interests most of the time and definitely not how I want to experience things by default.
  Sure, when I want to go looking for something, good algorithms that are actually designed to make me happy and not just increase my engagement on the site through morally bankrupt choices, fine, but that's just not my default.
  
  I'm definitely the other way, I want to see the stuff that's there because I asked for it, and I want to ping pong around from people to the people they talk to to find new people. If I don't already know of at least one interesting person or instance, why am I even joining the thing?
  I appreciate having a list of people I could follow, but if there isn't one I remember how to make my own fun.
- I honestly really like discovering things organically as opposed to having "content" shoveled in my face. Say I follow an artist who happens to share the work of another artist I didn't know about. There's a connection and I can follow that person. It's simple.

Hello, have you tried Akkoma or Firefish?
- Agree with this comment: Firefish is much better than the current state of Mastodon, especially since all the complaints you have are basically being wont-fixed by the current dev team.
  
  Is anyone actually on Firefish though? The issue with these platforms is that they don't really become usable until they have a decent userbase.

The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
I might agree with you on federated, but the local timeline on smaller or tight knit instances tend to be really nice. I'm on this instance's Hajkey (slightly customized Firefish fork) and spend most of my time on the local timeline. It's only when you get to the size of .social, .online and whatnot that it loses it's usefulness. And that seems to be the direction website boy wants to take Mastodon given he took the local timeline out from the official Mastodon mobile app.
The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???
Full text search is an admin setting that can be turned on and off I believe. It (the way Mastodon implements it at least) takes a lot of server resources which is why most instances don't bother.
- When I was using Mastodon, the local timeline was almost exclusively what I was paying attention to. It was a really nice small community of people.

I've been on and off mastodon since 2019 and I've really wanted to like it, however the lack of a usable search kills it for me. I guess when your the main dev and you have half of mastodon following you a usable search isn't really necessary. Someone did try to work on a way to scrape and make mastodon searchable but they got hounded off mastodon I believe?
I tried to use hashtags but the ones I followed seemed to have a large number of terminally online/bots posting links making finding anything useful practically useless. In the end I got fed up of the feeling I was shouting into the void. I want to use and like Mastodon but I felt like I was fighting the system.
I'm just glad Lemmy seems to have taken off it's not perfect but it's certainly on the way
- You're*
  
  I swear I read through my post before hitting post. Thanks stranger

It actually does appear that Mastodon doesn't know how many replies there are until it loads them for display. Glitch, a Mastodon fork with some UI enhancements has an option to display an estimate of the number of replies. Lemmy obviously displays an exact comment count while using the same protocol. There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.
A trending feature should probably have the option to include federated content, as some instances are very small, even single-user.
I find the stance taken by Mastodon's developer and many users... I'll be charitable and say unreasonable. It's about a dozen lines of code to add a proper search and there are two ways to do it (Postgres text search is easy, Elasticsearch may be better for big servers). Some server admins have implemented this.
I'm seeing that for both follows and followers.
There are other ActivityPub Twitter-alikes that may meet your needs better, such as Akkoma. Akkoma has reasonable search, can show remote follows and followers, and seems to keep accurate reply counts. It's not as polished looking though.
- There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.
  Lemmy communities work by having a psuedo-user that "boosts" all posts and comments it receives to all it's subscribers, meaning all instances are aware of all comments (as long as at least one user is subscribed, and barring any defederation). I'm not entirely sure on what the "reply fetching algorithm" of Masto is, but it doesn't go out of it's way to fill everything.

I mean, you're not wrong. The "problems" of Mastodon are features. Avoiding an algorithm to suggest toots was done on purpose. It's why likes are simply for the author, not really for others. Boost promote toots by increasing exposure.
Likes are not the same as likes on Twitter, nor should they really matter. The intent of Mastodon is not to promote some toots over others due to popularity which many times just creates feedback loops. It's why you would see repetitive content on Reddit and if Lemmy gets remotely the same size, it'll suffer the same way. Algorithms are problematic in that they tend to get abused.

My Mastodon search has never worked either, Lemmy is a much better Reddit alternative than Mastodon is a Twitter alternative

I have barely ever used Twitter and yet I tried Mastodon, but it is uninteresting to me, maybe I just don't like microblogging social media, Reddit/Lemmy in other part is easier for me to get addicted lol.

This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can't happen.
- And that's a bad thing. While you may think of Instagram- or OF models when thinking about influencers, there are also many artists and other content creators that rely on reach provided to them by large, easy to search through content platforms. If Mastodon by design hampers those people's reach, they won't join and with them all their followers won't either.
  
  So, there are commercial networks for people who want to do commercial things with corporations and sponsors. Mastodon doesn't want to be that. If someone wants to use Mastodon for that, they are fighting the stream.
  
  But...it doesn't. I guess some people just can't live without an algorithm to them what to see.
- I agree. The thing I like about Mastodon is that I made friends and met other people with similar interests. Nobody is trying to make interaction bait, it's great.

Mastodon's search not applying to all posts is 'a feature, not a bug', as mentioned in the documentation:
Admins may optionally install full-text search. Mastodon’s full-text search allows logged-in users to find results from their own posts, their favourites, their bookmarks and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database, in order to reduce the risk of abuse by people searching for controversial terms to find people to dogpile.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/#search
I do understand the rationale behind it in that it makes it safer for people to share personal or political things to their followers without the risk of abuse from strangers, and the recommended alternative is to hashtag any post that's okay to be publicly found.
The problem with this is that there is no agreement on which hashtags to use consistently, and that people are not used to, or feel a stigma about, adding hashtags to the end of each post.
- I never used any bird app, curious: what's the social stigma about adding hashtags? I thought it was seen as cool or at least normal. #justasking #stupidquestion
  
  Some people consider it an overly attention-seeking behaviour, because overusing hashtags is associated with marketing and influencers trying desperately to gain maximum reach on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
  Meanwhile, on Mastodon it's more of a thing to hashtag posts with like #photography or #[nameofvideogame] when sharing things, so other people with the same interests can find them.
  
  Aside from any stigma, some people just don't use them. Some don't understand how they work, sometimes people forget.
  Hashtags have value, but to make them essential instead of optional is a bad choice.
  
  They have the stigma of overflowing the content and distracting from the human, let's have a conversation, part to focus mostly on the promotion and algorithmic sorting and advertisement part. The most egregious example being the hash walls. Tweets were the actual content is a short sentence followed by a gigantic string of hashtags in the hopes this will get more exposition. The purposes of a tag is that you want to be found by people who don't follow you, abuse of it screams attention-seeking.

Yeag you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

Personally, I’m happy with both. Lemmy and Mastodon are far from perfect and both feel sorta beta, though Mastodon is further along.
Search is weak on both platforms, imo, but I expect it will improve eventually.
You mention favorite counts only being your instance, but same is true for community subscribers here.
Also landing on other instances from outside links can be confusing to find the same content in your instance (Mastodon and Lemmy).
Federation does make things more complicated. But it beats centralization.
In the end, it comes down to your personal end use and preferences.
Personally, I like Mastodon for conversations and I like Lemmy for community building - I mod !alternativenation@lemmy.world - and that works for me. 💕
(Though I’d kill for some consistent performance from Lemmy after trying to comment 3 times)

Try firefish

Essentially the main issue I have with Mastodon is that it's UI is confusing AF.

What if I tell you all of the points you mentioned are in Lemmy too?

Huh I thought people on Mastodon just tended to prefer “retweets” over Likes haha

This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.
I'd like to see "trending" removed entirely from Mastodon. I don't give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I've got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.
The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It's badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.
This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.
- is the reason many of us were on Twitter to begin with. I never kept to with friends there, but I really liked seeing breaking news, etc. It was useful and functional. Madstodon is not useful in this way, which breaks one of the key features many of us want in a Twitter replacement.
  Sounds like I need to look at this Fish place instead.
  
  That's me. Besides the ads/promotion/tracking shit pre-elon Twitter was doing pretty much exactly what I want from it. It was mostly for the parasocial relationships not for keeping up with actual friends. I'd get news and announcements straight from the source quickly and even with a verified checkmark to help ensure I wasn't getting trolled. Now it's trash.
  
  That's what makes threads like this so interesting to me. I never got into Twitter(despite many attempts literally since it was first released) but absolutely love Mastodon. And sometimes I read these threads and just think...what?
  But in reality it just comes down to your individual use case and whether the specific thing that Mastodon is actually fits that use case.
  Until this thread, for example, I didn't know there was such a thing as a trending tab and I didn't know there was a problem seeing people's follows because it would never have occurred to me to look.
  I use the advanced interface and, while I do follow people, very very rarely pull up the home feed. My columns are all crafting hashtags and my local feed because I'm on a crafting-focused server.
  If you're into following topics, Mastodon is a great time. If you're into following people or you want to to kept up to date with the outside world then I can definitely understand not being a fan.
  
  Big agree, Twitter I previously used to see "what's happening" in the world outside my little bubble
  
  If you wanted spoon-fed content, then yes, Twitter is the place for you! And you know what? It's still there!
  I left Twitter because of the spoon-fed content and the algorithmic attempts to "engage" me by fostering outrage and am happy that Mastodon thus far does not have this misfeature. If you want that misfeature Twitter is still there. So is BlueSky (eventually). So is Threads. So is Instagram. So is Facebook. There's an embarrassment of choice for the pabulum crowd. Please don't bring it here.
- Seeing upvotes on posts is literally why you're using Lemmy right now. Advertising / engagement driven media can exploit our desire to get feedback on what we say but getting feedback on what we say is not a new or novel phenomena, it's a fundamental part of human nature and why we converse. It's literally the exact same reason why doing a zoom presentation with cameras on, so that you can read body language, is better than cameras off, where you feel like you're talking to an empty uncaring void.
  If you want to catch up with you family and friends go outside and talk to them or call them, or hell, set up your instance and only allow their posts to come through. The rest of the world users twitter to connect with the Twitterverse not their neighbours.
  I see no reason it would be any harder than Lemmy syncing upvotes acros ls thousands and thousands of comments.
  
  First, I don't give a shit at all about the upvote counts (and even less of a shit about the downvote counts) on Lemmy. To the point I have them concealed. Second, so you're saying a different piece of software with different goals does things differently? WOW WHAT AN OBSERVATION! YOU SHOULD GO APPLY FOR A NOBEL PRIZE, GOOD SIR!
  Please point to where I said "family"? (Hint: this is not possible.)
  You see no reason, ergo there is no reason, Q.E.D. You, sir, are also a consummate logician.

I’m using Mammoth to interact with Mastodon and other than the likes, reposting difference that’s made to diminish the echo chamber, it works very much like Twitter. Searching is great and the app works really well and looks great. Oh and the content is of much higher quality on the regular.

I believe the 0, 1, 1+ reply counts is a setting available to your instance admins. Mine actually does count.

To me they're two different things, to be used in different ways, which is a good thing, I suppose.

I don’t have any issues with it. I use Ice Cubes, it’s awesome.

I'm on glitch soc instead of mastodon and I've liked it a lot
it pretty much fixes most of my biggest gripes with mastodon and I hide the counters anyway because the number isn't very important to me

I like it as a concept but it's got some growing to do.

3rd party exists

Meh The modlog is so active it's dead

I don't have your issues with it. I have a ton of interactions on Mastodon and everything is clear.
The problem people have with mastodon is how they see it. You wrote all your rant about mastodon being a copy of Twitter with the Twitter terminology. Mastodon is not Twitter.
I did the same mistake at the beginning. I thought it was a federate Twitter. It made it empty and frustrating to use. I didn't understand what people do there.
I give it a second try. This time, I took another way to understand it. Instead of comparing to Twitter and thinking at a federated Twitter, I took it like a new experience.
After that, I discover the philosophy behind mastodon and it's completely different. It's not Twitter or a Twitter like. People are nice and really active.
The number of reply doesn't matter that much. What is important are the boosts. People need to find groups boosting the toots. You need to mention the group when you toot and you need to follow groups. The second is hashtags to follow and search for. But hashtags aren't the primary thing to follow.
Then, you begin to find accounts to follow. But keep in mind the philosophy is different and you won't use it as Twitter.

The mastodon community is so incredibly bad, they're the biggest downfall. They also actively push for development of harmful features that kills adoption. If you disagree, you have a "growth" mindset which is somehow bad, and must be a silicon valley tech bro that hates lgbtia. Thank god Lemmy is a good example that discoverbility doesn't need to be broken with ActivityPub.
Also they really need an algo, I don't care how much they preach that it's better without. It's just incredibly boring and hides high quality content without one.

I love mastodon and it’s funny little brother Lemmy. Both are great.
- Care to elaborate? Do you agree or disagree with the op on any of their takes?

Pretty sure that thing about likes, boosts, and favorites not showing up as a count is just a setting. I see full counts.

So, you're not so much interested in 'social' media as you are 'attention seeking' media.
It's becoming apparent to me that all the complaints I see people posting about the fediverse are exactly the things that I like about it.

its exactly like twitter except not as dank

I'm on kbin. Much better than lemmy.
- how do i remove random posts that appear on the side on kbin?
- My issue with Kbin is that it's missing some of the communities from Lemmy. For example, h3h3productions@lemmy.world isn't available on Kbin and I can't add it. Also, it annoys me seeing empty image placeholders on every post. Last time that I used Kbin, it also kept showing error messages every couple minutes. Kbin just isn't ready for mainstream adoption. Lemmy is.
  
  Uh.. You should be able to add it. You might need to search on: @h3h3productions@lemmy.world. Which is the whole point of federation, right?

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