Mastodon

It’s basically forum discussion vs microblogging, and they are different types of social media. I myself prefer a forum type format because the focus of discussion is on a topic and doesn’t need my identity to be involved in. It’s also hard to maintain a conversation on a microblogging format when many people are replying to each other at the same time, unlike a forum where there are nested threads. It’s the reason I never got into twitter.

I did try mastodon because it was on the fediverse, but stopped posting after 2 weeks because I couldn’t think of anything interesting to post and it was hard to follow conversations with other people. It was also weird knowing there were people "following" me and will see everything I post.

I just like threaded discussion. It doesn't matter who I am, I'm just the first person in this comment chain.

Though there's been some bugs with showing context, hopefully those are addressed soonish.

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.

Eh, they're for different things. Lemmy is for discussions, Mastodon is for following creators (IMO).

This is a really weird thing to post here to be honest and yet I think I've already seen this thread like five times. In so far as there is a Lemmy circle jerk this is definitely part of it.

Yeah, I'll follow someone on Mastodon or Twitter because they post funny content, but then they start posting selfies or something and I have to decide how much of that I mind scrolling past every so often.

It makes so much more sense to follow topics than individuals.

Good for you. Stick with what you like.

The ActivityPub protocol (the plumbing of the Fediverse) makes them interoperable and that's good. Other than that, knock yourself out.

My mastodon is like an abandoned city with only a few people in it. It's so quiet and depressing. Lol

The lack of a thread-view is just annoying. It's much easier to follow discussions with a thread-view.

Following hashtags tends to help get more broad content. Yes, Mastodon is more individual focused, but sometimes that's what someone prefers.

I'm trying to use it like Twitter where I find people and organizations to follow who are funny or interesting...but the majority of people "boost" other stuff more than they post. This gets problematic for me because you just follow a few accounts and suddenly your feed is so full you can't read through it all. I want it to be manageable... I want to follow people I enjoy reading...but I don't necessarily want to see 30 posts a day that they like. Maybe I'm using it wrong or thinking about it wrong. I enjoy some things about it and I'm happy it exists, but I'm having trouble finding a lot posts and users that I find super engaging.

I follow probably 30 Lemmy communities and scrolling through the feed brings me much more that is interesting, beautiful, funny, insightful...

You can also look into kbin which supports both the regular article based content (like Reddit with subreddits) and posts (which are like tweets attached to a topic with tags).

Been finding some decent topics to follow recently

I think masto and indie/fedi microblogging makes sense for seeing the empherial now that you are interested not topic based content. (Especially on small niche instances via the local feed) its a also great way to meet like minded people and build longer lasting connections as you see more of a person via their stream than only seeing them in niche spaces. Granted many people single topic their accounts, but masto is way more personal and less influencer type accounts than Twitter was, though those accounts exist too. You can still follow topics, but that's a way of finding new people with shared interests not necessarily only deep diving in a topic.

Lemmy and topic forums in general are great at deep diving in a topic, but since you stay in the niche while you might see people frequent in that niche you really don't have those longer interactions. Some forum communities try to mitigate this by having general chat posts or chat rooms on the side.

Different kinds of social media have their strengths.

I, too, prefer topic focused content. On Mastodon I can somewhat achieve this by browsing hashtags. For me, hashtags ~ communities. This is the only reason I was able to get interested in Mastodon. Also, I enjoy sharing sharing articles etc which I find interesting.

Never used Mastadon but the way you're describing it, it sounds like they're doing what digg tried to do in 2010, and we all know how well that went for them.

I would love Mastodon with Lemmy/Reddit-ish sorting. Purely chronological feed means I get low quality content at the top of my feed simply because someone posted something 2s with a hashtag I follow.