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 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.
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.
I think it’s much easier to discover new content on Lemmy.
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.
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.
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”.
