Having tried all three, its a stark difference in how much more social Lemmy is comparatively. Its not even close. Almost all posts I’ve encountered on lemmy have interaction; whereas, more often than not, posts on the other two platforms have no interaction. Wonder what the driving factor is behind this difference?
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Mastodon & others are microblogging (aka shitpost) platforms, while lemmy lets you ask questions in posts that will persist (not get flooded under a megaton of shitpost, hentai) and get answers.
On on mastodon what’s important is who you are (who you know, who you can interact with), on lemmy your post’s content is more important.
On Mastodon, follow and interact with people you admire, not content.
Go to pypi look for packages you admire, find their maintainers, and get chatting with them. Coders make themselves available on mastodon. Not lemmy. Not twitter. Email is passe.
Do a survey. Look up 20 random packages you admire on pypi. What contact info do they provide? These packages must be actively maintained. Otherwise understand if dinosaurs in the past communicated thru mostly hand gestures and grunting.
Published coders are the richest resource of talent in the history of mankind.
Lemmy … asking questions?! Is that it?
There is more to interacting and collaboration than hit and run knowledge sharing.
Lemmy is discussion focused, the bulk of content is the comments guided by posts. Mastadon/nostr are about microblogging, the posts are the focus of content, not the comments.
you are missing out. Which is much worse than just being wrong.
The focus of mastodon is on the people, not the comments.
Deeply care about the other person and then you’ll be interacting with someone you admire
The comments are topics they find interesting and want to share.
With coders, when they post something, is usually mostly signal.
Microblog… I just don’t care about other people that much. Specific topics are more engaging and interesting.
Then to get something out the opportunities the universe is gifting you, all you have to do is turn on that empathy switch and adjust the level up to max.
The issue is all in your head.
You are surrounded by giants, but you don’t notice or care.
Force yourself to care.
Find someone tomorrow and magically decide they are now the most important person in your universe moving forward. And you want to keep in touch with them regularly. And you find what they are up to thrilling.
Then type in this url
This will be enough to fill your entire lifetime and then some.
Sorry, what?
i care about other people, specifically coders. They are my rock stars. And that’s who i want to keep in touch with.
On mastodon, if have something up your sleeve others want to have access to you. I get access to certified, cuz whats that, geniuses. They have the repos, source code, and unittests to prove it!
On lemmy, not so much.
Or riddle me this, how to build relationships on lemmy?
You don’t. I head back to Reddit personals for that.
Has anyone else never even heard of nostr
Yes, and its activitypub bridge Mostr.
Never heard of Mostr either icl
nostr is yet another twitter, but for “anti censorship” folk, such as cryptobros and “freeze peach absolutists”. Also has some crypto integration that lets it have shops and even a tiktok video thingy.
Huh. My experience with Nostr is essentially similar with fediverse. As it was decentralized, everything is depends on each instance and which kind of people you follow.
Not everyone on Nostr are everything you just said. Some people are literally using it the same way as Mastodon. Just making friend and talking about random hobbies.
I have, but pretty much have figured out its for crypto bros who don’t want people telling them not to shill their crypto shit, or fucking fascists who don’t like people being able to just… turn them off, for being fascists.
There is no block feature? What the hell.
I do have and use Mastodon. But more and more I keep thinking that traditional blogs + rss are a better fit for me.
What’s the diff? I have a web site that functions like a traditional blog, offers RSS, but it’s an ActivityPub application that participates in the Fediverse. Doesn’t that describe every Mastodon-alike?
Longer posts. More control over formating. Easier to post more types of media.
And maybe it’s less of a “social” media, and more of a “personal” project.
Maybe it’s 90s nostalgia talking, but I miss those cool personal webpages.
The thing about Mastodon is that you have to really heavily curate.
On Forum Blogs, like here, if you go to All, you will see articles, questions, images, and communities.
On Micro Blogs, like Mastodon, if you go to all you will see articles, but the rest will mostly be international thoughts of the day, some of which may be questions, non-sequitors, and images.
Not so much the communities, by default.
That doesn’t mean that Mastodon/the like can’t, you just have to curate it a bit more. I followed #Bloomscrolling and it brings tons of nature in my feed, it’s lovely. But if you follow like, @GamingFeed it’s just reposted content that looks for keywords – my Helldivers 2 posts were being promoted but also random articles and posts from others. Somewhat useful for finding articles, but hollow because it’s just a bot I’m certain.
I also find that while there are communities on mastodon, they’re pretty niche so you end up limited to roughly the same things here, tech either hardware or software, gaming or relatives like figures, nature, or politics (though I’ve found Mastodon is fairly less political on a default account. Wasn’t using it much though so I may have missed it entirely).
Meanwhile on Lemmy and the like, you pretty much just get shown communities. We all know ich_el or whatever that German meme one is, we all have passed by 196, that sort of thing doesn’t appear on Mastodon so much.
That said, I do see mastodon accounts commenting on posts on Lemmy, so it’s also possible to mix them. I will say, generally the mastodon comments do not go into as much thoughtful detail in response on these articles, but that could very well be an instance limitation (some have 40k characters, some have 500-2000).
So there are some fairly large differences and while they can technically accomplish the same thing, there can a bit of a cultural difference between the two formats. And as you probably know, default instances also can change this experience on both – Solarpunk.moe is awesome and well moderated and is focused on solarpunk, mastodon.social is pretty large and chaotic. Lemmy is the same way, of course, slrpnk.net is fairly small compared to the major instances and the home feed reflects that
The format is certainly more conducive to discussion. On the flip side though since communities reside in spaces and are moderated by individuals here, compared to the more ‘broadcast’ nature of using tags on Mastodon, you end up with some really bad echo chambers on Lemmy. Just a quick look at a basic news community between instances will show a massive slant depending who runs it. With Mastodon people talk more globally and the obnoxious ones just get blocked en-masse rather than so much being at a mod’s whim.
On the flip side though since communities reside in spaces and are moderated by individuals here, compared to the more ‘broadcast’ nature of using tags on Mastodon, you end up with some really bad echo chambers on Lemmy
These are two sides of the same coin, one side you called community and the other side you called echo chamber. Whether a particular community/echo chamber is “bad” or “good” is a matter of your interpretation.
To reword using more proper terms for the system, ‘communities reside in instances’. A community called ‘news’ on .world’s instance is a far different thing than on hexbear for example.
An echochamber is just a trait of a given community where any dissenting views from the home instance mods are reported and deleted. At least those actions are visible via the modlogs on here so it stays transparent though.
The problem with “free speech” instances is that it supports the dominant narrative, regardless of validity, and in many cases this results in far-right views being dominant as they aren’t removed and everyone else leaves. This means some degree of “censorship” is required to run an instance. Further, everyone has a bias, so it’s important to make that bias clear. The difference between news on .world and news on hexbear is liberal-domination or leftist domination in views.
I’ll generally agree to all that. What I notice though is that far left instances (and I imagine far right as well, though I don’t think I’ve really seen any on Lemmy) are far quicker to delete and ban than a more centrist instance who are more prone to let the argument play out unless it gets outright hostile/personal. When that delete button is too easy to use you get where someone can’t have a proper discussion at all.
There’s a difference in how “censorship” is conducted on, say, Lemmy.world vs Hexbear.net. Lemmy.world does soft censorship, they outright defederated from the 2 largest leftist instances. In a manner, this can be seen as banning every account from the 2 largest leftist instances, an extreme act of censorship, but it isn’t recognized as such because it is soft. Outright removals of comments and posts are seen as hard censorship, as you remove viewpoints and people, which Hexbear does frequently with liberals and other right-wingers.
Lemmy.world uses this curated audience as a “narrative ecosystem,” by removing any input from the largest leftist instances, there’s no real leftist pushback against the dominant liberal narrative. Hexbear on the other hand takes a more honest approach, and just says outright that liberalism isn’t allowed and is bannable.
I wouldn’t say the leftist communities are more heavy handed, but that they are more honest and forthright with how they exert control over their communities, it’s more transparent.
I’d expect if there was an equivalent of ‘gab’ or ‘truth social’ they would be defederated too. I can understand an action like that because people join these places specifically because it’s an echo chamber fitting their viewpoints and they’re allowed and even encouraged to be hostile to outsiders.
With the way the fedi is set up you can certainly set up multiple accounts, and I’m sure there are more than a couple from those instances cut off that create accounts elsewhere to have those conversations. The difference being that they’re expected to behave in a civil fashion rather than just screaming at others.
On my single-user instance I haven’t defederated anyone and only blocked a handful of outright spam/troll accounts and a couple who seem to have a single life purpose to push an agenda.
There actually are those instances, they are just broadly defederated, lol.
There are definitely people that make accounts elsewhere to “engage beyond the wall” so to speak, but Hexbear and Lemmygrad for example exist for their own users, not as a “base of operations” for widespread brigading like some claim. It’s nice to visit spaces free from liberalism and constant arguing, as a Marxist-Leninist myself. I also think the “screaming” type of behavior is more frequently found on liberal instances than leftist ones, but that’s anecdotal and I have no way to prove it, other than the suggestion that perhaps our implicit bias clouds what we percieve as civil and what as “screaming” in the context of comment debates.
tags?
do the research to track down exactly who to interacting with.
then what would be the use of tags? Force of habit. Something to do to pass the time?
You can follow tags for a while in Mastodon, that way you don’t have to follow a specific person but more a topic.
will try out the suggestion
I assume because people follow topics on lemmy, unlike microblogging where people have to follow each other to interact (one-to-many vs one-to-one). So it’s easier to interact with many people that you don’t necessarily had to be following prior, which increases the chances of interacting with more people.
you can follow hashtags. I follow #opensource and a few other interests and I’ve found some interesting stuff you don’t generally see in other places. but yes, the format is completely different and I find lemmy allows for better discussion than Mastodon.
you can follow hashtags.
Interesting. Perhaps I should give mastodon another go.
Yeah Mastodon seems way less about discussion and way more about surfacing cool shit you wouldn’t otherwise see.
I’ve never heard of Nostr but Mastodon is a twitter clone and I don’t find that style of website suits discussion well since you subscribe to accounts rather than communities.
It’s an interesting dynamic!
I find myself talking more on lemmy as others say because it’s easier/made for talking about topics. Mastodon and other fedi services center around following the account that made a thing rather than the thing(s) themselves. And that’s fine, both have their place.
I think the other aspect is the easy to follow discussion threads. IMO it’s the cleanest way to show and follow branching discussions.
You follow hashtags. It’s what I do and it’s been a good experience so far.
It’s about the same as on Lemmy engagement-wise.
I’ve never understood what twitter style websites are actually for. They seem to have a tiny niche of celebrities and known personalities making a statement with no reasonable conversation stemming from it.
I don’t understand how that structure was once one of the largest social media platforms in the first place.
the content is github
a distribution / marketing site is pypi
you are interacting with technologists.
The content already exists. And are interacting around that content. Rather than generating more and more content forever in a loop leading to nothing but more noise.
And you have direct access to these people! If a reasonable conversation is lacking it’s cuz you are not bringing the party to the bar.
You are the star that makes the conversation happen.
So dial up a person 100x smarter than you. And find something to ask them.
Like a ChatGPT but will actual intelligence and passion at the other end.
In my experience Twitter was for modern Seinfeld jokes, mastodon is for monsterdon Sundays at 9pm et, and Lemmy is for commenting on Internet stuff.
Mastodon is so boring for me. Some people boost me because I discuss my research or Linux but rarely any engagement
What really kills my engagement with Mastodon (aside for never being a regular Twitter user) is that posts in undesired languages still filter in my feed (I follow hashtags) even when I set up only two languages… Not everyone is filtering theirs I guess…
Stop with the feeds entirely from randos.
the streaming noise in arabic then French and Chinese is trying to drive the point home that u are doing something obviously wrong
try grabbing that French poster by the Freedom fries and get to know him.
Ask him about his adventures in Africa. Bet his colonial exploits come with some insights
You mean you only filter your two languages then they only come in?
Yeah exactly, I have no language issues while using Lemmy clients.
It’s probably that Lemmy is communities but mastodon is individuals
rock stars, not individuals
The fuck is Nostr? I can’t keep up.
I know, right? It was very hard for me to grasp the Fediverse when i first heard about it. Now, it seems the protocol is being tapped into from a few different directions, so these new platforms may just be starting to make an appearance.
Nostr is another fediverse like social media platform that the founder of bluesky created after he realized he had made another mistake like he did in creating twitter.
shit posters keeping lemmy/mbin alive.
Doesn’t mbin federate with Mastodon? I’ve been thinking about moving to an mbin server for that reason…
Why are you comparing apples to glass bowls?
Lemmy is a reddit clone, where you create communities.
Mastodon is a Twitter clone, where you share what you ate last night or what political meme you like today while sharing photos of moss and/or windows.
Nostr is its own thing.You can’t really compare them with each other.
Yeah, I get your point. But the question still remains. Lemmy objectively has more engagement/interaction regardless of the category of social media of each medium.
If you compare X to Lemmy, X has more engagement/interaction… And they are separate social media platforms categorically. Yet, Mastodon trumps Lemmy’s user count by nearly 10 fold…
It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement is considerably higher?
It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?
I think the answer is fairly clear. Lemmy’s topics & votes system funnels condenses the user-base to focus on particular things at particular times. The total number of users may be smaller than Mastodon, but basically everyone on lemmy is looking at the top posts on the front page first, and then exploring to other stuff later; whereas on Mastodon everyone is just doing their own thing.
Focusing people on one topic means that there will be discussion at that topic at that time; and discussion leads to people checking back to read and reply to responses…
I routinely use both Mastodon and Lemmy. I see a lot more varied content on Mastodon, but it is more fleeting. i.e. very little discussion, and fairly short window of interaction with posts. Lemmy has a lot less ‘stuff’, but a lot more conversation.
I think the difference is interesting, but it definitely isn’t something we should use to say which platform is doing better or anything like that.
It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?
mastodon is another “general interest” social media hub along the same vein of reddit or bluesky or .world or .ee, which means that (excluding its founding group) it takes many forms of long term investments to gain sufficient traction enough to establish a core group of active users (assuming that it ever succeeds at doing so at all) and that core group is a small fraction of its user base (presuming that a reddit post i saw years ago showing that a tiny fraction of users on social media are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of content on all platforms is true).
lemmy’s political origins pre-included the identities and accompanying pre-built core groups that had already start coalescing in other social media platforms like reddit & tiktok. by the time of the reddit blackout protests those groups already had new online safe spaces in various lemmy instances and their ranks swelled at the same time other reddit users started to fill the ranks of other “general interest” instances like .world and later .ee
that link you posted on lemmy user counts reflects the “general interest” instance’s difficulties of retaining a core group of active users that disproportionately create the most content. it’s around this content is where you will find the interaction/engagement that characterizes lemmy’s considerably higher engagement; instead of the news & link sharing lower interaction/engagement that characterizes the “general interest” instances.
right now; the “general interest” instances have a relatively handful of VERY prolific users expending a clearly excessive amount of time and effort at creating a sea of inactive communities & instances in the hopes that it might eventually serve as a basis for a “general interest” core group and i hope that they succeed; i think that the lemmyverse would be better with politically moderate points of view and i’m sure that the “general interest” instances won’t lose all of their users to bluesky, threads, nostr, etc. by then.
An average post on Mastodon/X/Bluesky/Threads is “this is what I encounter” or “this is what I believe”. Those kinds of posts don’t specifically ask for a response. You can respond to it, but it doesn’t require one.
That’s not how you communicate on Lemmy or Reddit.
That’s the difference.
Each platform has its own usages.
So to compare and say “well platform Y is more social, because there’s more interaction than on platform 2” is a bit weird.
You wouldn’t compare a letter with a message board on a town plaza either. Both can be used to communicate, but they’re not comparable to each other.
Or in another way:
On Mastodon or Nostr, when you post something only a small subsection of the userbase actually sees it (only those who follow you, those that follow any of the hashtags that you used, or those that check the full firehose).
On Lemmy the entire community you posted it to can see your post.
Obviously you can get more response on Lemmy! More people get to see it.Twitter have big interaction because user count is extremely high. For a microblogging platform maybe it requires that it needs lots of users and some “creators” who are followed by thousands of people, unlike communities which anyone can post and everyone joined the community can see.
I also think upvotes and downvotes plays a role too since mastodon does not have them(only boosts but boost actually shares with your own followers which might be very low)
So what is Nostr?
Honestly, I think is the whole ”First Post” mindset.
When you post a reply on Mastodon, it is more intimate, the only people who see it are the original tooter and anyone who actively seeks more commentary. It is a dialogue between two people, or multiple dialogues between one person and many others.
Lemmy is more like a forum, where everyone can see all comments, right underneath the original post. It is more like an open-table discussion.
It is not that Lemmy is more social, it is just less personal.
One of the big things driving interaction is that Lemmy’s default comment sorting algorithm is a bit backwards to reddit’s. As long as you get upvoted once, newer comments will appear at the top. So even if you participate late in a discussion, you’re likely going to get responded to by other latecomers.
The fact that comments are prioritised by simple rules, an not by some sort of monolithic ALGORITHM, keeps the discussion dynamic.
It’s still an algorithm.
I am inferring a difference between an algorithm that is based on simple rules, and an algorithm that is constantly being dishonestly modified for commercial, political and financial benefit.
I find microblogging format isn’t really great for having any sort of meaningful discussion. Mastodon is good for posting news or memes, but that’s about it. Lemmy format allows having an actual dialogue, and that makes it a lot more engaging.
mastodon is awesome if you actually can bring yourself to want to interact with a real person.
If you can’t get anything out of mastodon you cannot get anything out of interacting with another human being.
Find someone to care about. Force yourself to care about them.
I prefer my interactions with other human beings to be deeper and more meaningful than what the format offers.
I think had all neolib journalists suddenly brought the chat over to mastodon ala bluesky the whole landscape would be different (and the EU would be feeling itself more)
it doesn’t matter what Europe does or does not do.
What matters is access to energy. Without which the civilization dies.
Where the journalists are therefore is irrelevant. Unless they’re packing their bags.
Or they have hidden a mobile fusion reactor in their basement and just bidding the time.
Lemmy format allows having an actual dialogue
It’s great for seeing existing dialogue, but I think it falls short for long term discussion between more than two people.
On a non-threaded board (e.g. forums, github issues) you can watch a thread you’re interested in. On Lemmy/reddit you only get notifications for direct responses to your comments.
I think some sort of option to watch/unwatch whole subtrees of comments would help a lot.
