Fediverse

They're different kinds of experiences.

Forum-type things like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker news, Reddit, etc. put the focus on the topic or community.

Micro-blog type things like Twitter, Mastodon put the focus on individuals.

If you want to see what your favourite author is posting about, or what your favourite musician is working on, or maybe behind the scenes pictures from a sporting event, microblogging platforms are great for that. Journalists also loved them because they could follow specific other journalists or other key people in the area they cared about, and get direct info from that source.

OTOH, if what you care about is a certain topic (F1 racing, beebop jazz, etc.) then forum-style platforms are better because the focus is the topic rather than the individuals.

Mastodon is WAY better if you follow tags. that said, I am very optimistic of Lemmy, it just needs a quality app.

I kind of see Mastodon as a Twitter replacement and Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. Each has specific use cases. I can see both platforms having value in my online engagement.

Yeah in general, I like forums better than the format Twitter is in. I like topic-based discussions more than discussions spawned from short, potentially out-of-context messages.

I'm gonna be honest Lemmy feels like a very chill place unlike Reddit or Facebook, it feels like defusing a bomb when talking on certain subreddits

Yeah, so far I fucking love lemmy! Open source software for the fucking win!

Damn I really miss forums.

I had the greatest times in the internet 20 years ago in forums where you could be part of something that felt like a community built over years. Found some long lasting friendships on forums. Sadly then came myspace and facebook and caused every single forum I used to die.

Honestly the fediverse somewhat can replace that because the instances emulate that feeling of community a little bit.

Lemmy and Reddit promote engagement, discourse and even arguments... ok, especially arguments.

Mastodon feels like a list of billboards that I am disconnected from.

"Oh, that's news"

But no one talks between eachother about anything. I almost feel like the nature of the layout of Twitter and it's alternatives are almost by design to make the users a little more self serving.

Mastodon has every user standing on a soapbox yelling at crowds, Lemmy is more of a public forum.

I think the main difference comes down to the sorting algorithms. In Lemmy we get the organic content sorting done by collective human appreciation or lack thereof of said content (↑, ↓). Generally better stuff rises to the top, and worse stuff sinks to the bottom. You can still see either if you like by changing the order. That coupled with sorting by community does a great job at sifting through the noise. In Mastodon you have hashtags that can serve as communities but there's no organic sorting within that. If you subscribe to #Linux, you'll get pretty much everything with #Linux, whether one or a thousand people found it valuable.

This does feel a lot like the reddit I missed, only better. I will also agree that I find myself more likely to engage here, versus reddit where I exclusively lurked.

I do too. Mastodon is great software, but I’ve never been much of a user of the micro blogging format. The Reddit/hacker news format has been my preference for many years.

I don't mind a community having low amount of content. It's easy to just join multiple and hop around. I don't mind a UI not entirely matching my preference, that stuff is "matter of time".

But Mastodon made it VERY hard to find the little content their communities did have. They have an anti-Trending philosophy, and that drove me, and most people I know, away. When I joined, they didn't even have proper tag searching, and to this day, the activity in a tag is still reported wrongly. When asked, I got aggressively told off that Text Search is evil and I'm evil for asking and no, I didn't even talk about twitter but I'm evil for even daring to make requests even lightly resembling a Twitter user's UX preferences (Aka: Discoverability and UX). I just wanted to hear a "oh that's broken and being worked on" but no, it was always a "no, we don't like that" instead.

No such thing here. I wanted to find the gaming subs, I found the gaming subs. I wanted to find a desolate abandoned community for Dota 2, bam, I found the desolate abandoned community for dota 2. Within 2 minutes I was on grounds with /c/PatientGamers.

It got slightly better. But won't ever fully fix itself. To me, and to a couple colleagues, Mastodon was a bad website, with bad gatekeepers and a bad advert for the Fediverse. I don't care about it and I hope Rhynodon some day comes, implements text search and steals all their users.

@DidacticDumbass I love liking this from Mastodon and the fact that you are more comfortable with a different platform interoperable with the rest of the Fediverse

Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile.

I’ve never been able to find the meme posts on mastodon, therein lies part of its core issues, federation makes discoverability iffy at best. It hasn’t yet reached mass yet.

Yeah same here, Reddit is my mindless scrolling app of choice, not Twitter, so when I tried to use Mastodon I just kinda stood there not knowing what to do

I love being able to read and immerse myself is specific communities and whatnot, and specifically I love Reddit for the discourse, people posting in a community, replying to posts, and replaying to those replies, and so on

So Lemmy has just become my jam, so happy that Reddit has an open source federated alternative now, even if they reverse their API debacle I'm still gonna keep using this app

I agree with you mastodon is to much like Twitter and Twitter sucks reddit has always been much more fun to me so I'm hoping lemmy can get some traffic going

I'm Gen Z and when I was little my parents were (rightfully) very careful with how much time I spent on the internet. Even so, I saw from a distance the old internet, where forums were a thing and you could find lots of cool websites that people made for reasons that weren't limited to promoting or selling something.

When I discovered Reddit it was like I could somehow experience that time, but for many the decline had already started.

I love interacting with people, asking and answering questions, discovering and making others discover new things, but I just can't stand feeling like everything and everyone is trying to sell me something anymore.

Now that I'm here, I feel like this could be the place, at least for a while.

I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.

Servers running these apps connect to the same fediverse Mastodon servers connect to. As does Lemmy. All these apps just give you different ways to view the same social network, so which software you use makes less difference to what you can see than which server you use. Because there is no global view of the network, what you'll find in hashtag searches or federated timelines in the micro-posting apps (Mastodon, Pler/Akkoma Miss/CalcKey) depends on which accounts are being followed from the server hosting your account.

I'm new to Lemmy's way of viewing the 'verse, so I'm not sure what the equivalent is here. But I think what @dave describes in this thread about Communities hosted on other Lemmy servers taking a while to show up in searches here is relevant: https://lemmy.nz/comment/28480

I'd say this type of layout that focuses more on long form textual content is better for tech savvy people who are likely to stick with the fediverse than the twitter clone that Mastodon was.

I like Mastodon, but I like Lemmy more. That said, I liked Reddit a lot more than Twitter so it makes sense I'd prefer Lemmy. I'd rather follow topics than people, and Mastodon/Twitter are about following people (yes you can subscribe to hashtags on Mastodon, but it isn't the same).

That said, I still have and use both.

I tried mastodon, saw it was like twitter and never used it again lol. I like the deaddit feel much more

Reddit to me felt like I'd found a home. My score shot up into the thousands and I felt it was somewhere that was mine. I was on Twitter but never got into it, left when the orange babboon was allowed back on, and don't miss it.

Mastodon has big “this is the year of the Linux desktop” energy, just self-absorbed posting and no collaboration between users. Aside from a rare few exceptions, it’s a bunch of frumps. All the shitposters went to BlueSky.

100% agreed with you, I much prefer this type of site.

I am a long time Twitter user. Singed up in 2007. Mastodon felt like a superior platform and I've been quietly waiting for Lemmy to take off.

If you like old forums check out lemmyBB