Despite mastadon being more active, it seems less lively. I guess it’s because I preferred Reddit over Twitter in the first place.
Lemmy is also pretry similar to old.reddit. No recommendation or anything so its an easy migration.
I have only used Twitter and Mastodon sporadically, but its definitely more of a pain to discover communities since its more user oriented
Longer form content is always more fun for me. Structured topics and conversations are way better to exchange ideas and shitposts.
Mastodon app is great for people coming from Twitter but I love my Megalodon <3
Megalodon is the best!
The problem with mastodon is everyone is on mastodon.social
I mean, same can be said for Lemmy, how most people are on world/ml/beehaw. Doesn’t have to be the case, though. I have two accounts on Mastodon, one on Baraag the other on Mas.to, alternative instances exist
Personally, I am non cryptodon.lol but yes you are right. It also happens with matrix as most of the people are in matrix.org instance.
I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I’m part of on twitter. Ever since musk’s takeover, I’ve been using twitter less and less.
One of Mastodon’s upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don’t suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance’s users, which won’t cover interesting things from other instances (unless they’re specifically boosted).
Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don’t follow, on the topics you have an interest in.
Same here. I love how fluid Mastodon’s app is, especially compared to Lemmy’s. But I scroll for a bit and there’s nothing that interests me on my timeline.
No one is going to feed you content. It’s a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.
But you gotta bootstrap it. There’s a lot of interesting people and content in it.
There’s a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.
There’s hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.
I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it’s so worth it and rewarding. So, don’t quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It’s a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.
And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.
So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.
Seriously, follow hashtags! If friends start to join boost their early posts so other people can find them too. You take the place of the algorithm on Mastodon, so you’re ultimately responsible for curating your experience.
Though I will say, don’t use the offical app. It lacks a federated timeline still, which is weird. If you like that UI though, Moshidon is a fork that adds some customization and the federated timeline, which is a neat way to see what’s goin on.
I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it’s hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don’t like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it’s the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
That’s honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta’s Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it’s on the record that they’ve been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.
It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project
Jack Dorsey is the reason why some of these perennially online personalities moved to Bluesky. The AT protocol maybe decentralized but there’s no unofficial instances of it yet (afaik).
I see plenty of people on BlueSky without
.bluesky.socialin their @. Doesn’t mean they’re on another instance?I’m on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.
Word. Mastodon is fabulous. There’s not very many people, but I haven’t encountered many assholes. And does it ever run smooth!
It’s the best made app imo, with the best performance and design. If I had to rank them, I would rank Mastodon > Twitter > Threads > Bluesky.
I wouldn’t consider another VC money backed app/service anymore no matter how good the tech might be. I hope we all remember the hard lessons from the fiascos in the recent months.
That’s why Mastodon is my choice.
This brings up my main questions with mastodon and lemmy… who is going to pay the server costs at scale?
It would be nice if those mechanisms began sooner than later.
I’m tossing $10 to both a month. Many of us are doing that to avoid being the product.
Mastodon seems to become yet another rage cage like twitter, first thing I saw when I opened it yesterday was people bitching about politics, that’s a BIG nope for me
If you don’t care about the world, don’t follow people who do?
Like all social media, you have to curate it. I follow hashtags for cats, books, writing, fandoms, etc. The rage is minimum then because my homepage doesn’t have politics or news. I actually do follow a couple of news sources, but their stuff is surrounded by an ocean of fun things so it’s not nearly as bad.
You must’ve joined the wrong server then, because mine isn’t like that. And you can just filter out and follow the things you want as well. There’s no algorithms to automatically feed you stuff.
I didn’t even sign up, I just wanted to see what it was all about, whining about politics and general madness, just like twitter, not for me, so I didn’t end up signing
Well, you had to open some Mastodon server in your browser. And there will be differences between them, just like what’s on the front page of lemmy.world is different from the frontpage of lemmy.ml
Also, remember there are a bunch of nice 3rd party options for Android, like: Tusky (personal favorite), Fedilab, Megalodon, & Tooot
How good is Mastodon in general to follow football news? Transfer rumours and all?
Not there yet - but there are bot accounts that feed you their tweets. LOL Look up the accounts you have on Twitter for news and you’ll most likely find a bot account for them on Mastodon. That’s how I’m keeping up to date.
First time I gave Mastadon a shot now. It’s nice.
Special thanks to Kbin to introduce me into decentralized social media.
I’m using Tusky for now. It has more customization options than the official app. One thing I don’t like about the official app is that everything looks gigantic.
I like and use Tusky on my phone, and it also works as a Pixelfed client. But it’s not very good on tablets (in landscape). It not only doesn’t maximize the width of the screen, but you can’t scroll the feed from those unused sides of the screen. And one UI feature that Tusky is missing is the indented thread-depth lines that help you keep track of all the different reply sub-threads.
I did open a Mastodon account. But don’t use it much 😶
I made one at the same time I joined Lemmy but Mastodon seems like a ghost town
I’m so confused by comments like this. I use Mastodon every day and it seems pretty active to me.
It seems to me that discoverability is worse on Mastodon. Here, we have the top day sorting to see what’s going on.
Mastodon seems more likely to keep you in your bubble. I could find anything until I migrated to mastodon.social, where everyone is at.
Not just worse, it’s also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon’s vision of an “Everything” feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.
The reason that’s an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn’t figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our “All” feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.
This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they’d run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences… when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.
Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant.
Only if you’re on an instance that already has users subbing to a ton of communities. I’m not sure how this is much different than the federated timeline on Mastodon. If I joined a small lemmy instance it would be a similar experience. I’d need to reach out to find external communities that interest me.
Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts.
I’ve been pretty happy on noc.social. I’ll concede that my local timeline has a skew to it due to the server I’m on but the federated timeline is a bonkers firehose from all over the place.
Regardless, my point whenever this conversation comes up is to say that yes, I agree there’s a learning curve for new users going from a monolithic service to a federated one. But I don’t think the solution is to emulate a monolithic service (i.e. everyone on mastodon.social). I think the solution is to improve the on-boarding process and provide resources so that those new users are eased into the change and can learn how to find the content they want.
