From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
From news, to shitposting, to memes, to more shitposting, Lemmy feels vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun and even powerful. Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.
You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.
In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).
One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.
(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)
Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)
I’ve had limited experience with Akkoma and I personally love the early 2000s aesthetic, it’s also more feature complete and transparent to the end user than Mastodon (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives). I also experimented with Mastodon and noticed that whatever I posted on the akkoma instance couldn’t be seen while browsing from the mastodon instance: mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.
I might give it another try, look for a specific instance focused on something I’m interested in, even if just slightly, and try to blend in, instead of being the weird antisocial dude in the corner. No promises, tho.
I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)
Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)