because you touch yourself
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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I think it's much easier to discover new content on Lemmy.
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).
Mastodon users hates ice cream, that's all you need to know.
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.
Yep, two different models of social networking, I personally prefer the Lemmy model.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
@bruhbeans RNG. Also "fun" is subjective. Some of it is just cultural too. Mastodon has a certain βvibe" that has persisted since its early days while Lemmy's vibe is more imported from the more fun/wild days of Reddit.
I think it depends on the instance you're using. The one I'm on is very active. π€·
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Itβs sorta like how we value Wikipedia, which curates information, but other enshittified for-profit curators of information are trash. I donβt want the trash, but I also donβt want no curation at all. I value good curation. And Wikipedia shows it is possible to have good, or at least not garbage, curation of content.
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!).
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.
This is getting a little euphoric
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.
Because both of us are here! And we are fun people, won't you agree?
Just kidding!
Cheers, have fun.
Because youβre here.
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
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