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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Because both of us are here! And we are fun people, won’t you agree?
Just kidding!
Cheers, have fun.
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.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure Mastodon has algorithms. All internet infrastructure runs on algorithms, except for weird experimental AI stuff.
it sounds like bluesky would fit your use case. mastodon is not a twitter clone and never has been.
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.
what you are trying to do is not what mastodon is for.
mastodon has already achieved its goal.
your efforts are better targeted towards bluesky and their Feeds API. it’s exactly what you are asking for.
They don’t have beans on Mastodon.
They do have jeans tho
That is unfortunate.
Lemmy is and will forever remain pants optional.
Because you’re here.
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.
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
