I had been spending quite some time on mastodon, but lately realized that it just isn’t for me.
Mastodon is very focused on individuals, not as much on content. I’m not saying there isn’t a need for mastodon, and I’m happy it’s there, but my main use case is contacting (semi) public figures or software-support there, which happens rarely. Curating a feed that is both interesting to me and "high quality" without being overrun doesn’t seem feasible.
Lemmy is much more focused on content. You don’t follow people, you follow topics or interests and get the things surfaced that the most people in that interest group appreciate. The discussions work much better (Twitter-like reply’s are just one huge bag of trash). It also doesn’t matter who the people are behind the content, as long as it’s interesting it will find an audience.
Just something that I’ve been thinking about. Any thoughts on this?
You cannot really compare them. Mastodon is similar to Twitter and nothing more, it’s a microblogging service. Lemmy is like Reddit or the Usenet from back in the days with a nice threaded view. Many people on Reddit never used Twitter and vice versa.
This new fancy stuff is all part of the Fediverse, but that‘s a bit misleading. You can use one part and completely ignore all the other ones.
Sure, they're two different sites, but the smaller user base makes Mastodon harder to enjoy for most people since the people they know aren't using it. That's not an issue for Lemmy because no one cares about the specific users, they just want the content and discussion. I just think it's kinda interesting how the fediverse approach works to different degrees for different kinds of sites.
@RxBrad @flameguy21
I think they were more comparing the userbase of Mastodon against its corporate-owned alternatives, not to other fediverse apps.