From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
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.
Interesting people don’t post about their breakfast though
It’s harder to find the good stuff on Mastodon because you have to follow individuals or novelty accounts.
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.
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.
Hard agree on the algorithm point.
So what would be the solution as I believe many fedinautes and mastonautes agree on the fact that the way traditional social network did their algorithms is bad. Should the community develop a new kind of algorithm? Or a functionality to build your own?
I would love for some interoperable interface with a few default choices and then the option to load customized open source options!
It stems from a somewhat reactionary (in a “I don’t want chemicals in my food” way) prospective where they knew the outcome of algorithms was bad but didn’t understand why it was bad. Now they have their own algorithm and it’s repeating a lot of the same mistakes.
The chemicals analogy is actually pretty genius!
We’ve all seen a “I don’t want chemicals in my food” reactionary. They’re not racist or anything just fueled more by anger than by principal.
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.
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.
Because you’re here.
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
They don’t have beans on Mastodon.
They do have jeans tho
That is unfortunate.
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.
I think it’s much easier to discover new content on Lemmy.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
