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.
The difference is mastadon is how interesting your friends are. Lenny is how interesting the entire lemmy populous is.
I always hated the Twitter format, so Mastodon never appealed to me in the first place
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.
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.
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.
