I honestly think the tiny fraction of MAU might be the reason. Something like once you exceed a Dunbar Number of contacts in a community it starts to go downhill.

I think it's the gamification. Mastodon degamifies Twitter in a way Lemmy can't really do with the classic Reddit system.

Votes go up, votes go down, you can see people winning and losing here. It's fun, even if it's in a bad way.

From my experience, Mastodon is limited by interaction being more limited. On Twitter, I used to have the luxury of not needing to always know who I wanted to interact with. I could follow 30 celebrities I was interested in, go to their posts and find a plethora of people to interact with about something I cared about. That got me started until I found corners of Twitter that I liked.

Here on lemmy, there's a front page that's bound to have something worthwhile.

Both are helped by instances. If you're in the right instance for you, you already have an okay starting point.

Try following George Takei, Star Trek Minus Context, and/or the various cat accounts, e.g Cats of Yore.

I need to follow specific users on Mastodon to tailor my experience. On Lemmy, I follow entire communities where people can engage, all grouped by posts. It feels way less chaotic.

I know I could follow tags on Mastodon, but IMO their discoverability is even worse than communities, and if someone decides to spam a tag with irrelevant content there's not much I can do but to block the account.

With communities, there's at least some moderation happening.

But then maybe it's my own bias, I always preferred interacting on Reddit vs Twitter.

@bruhbeans RNG. Also "fun" is subjective. Some of it is just cultural too. Mastodon has a certain “vibe" that has persisted since its early days while Lemmy's vibe is more imported from the more fun/wild days of Reddit.

Maybe it is the...

Plenty of reasons already shared, I just want to add that I felt (still feel) the same about Reddit vs Twitter.

You go into All feed and despite your language being set to only English it's just a massive wall of Japanese text. Lemmy has the decency to automatically tag posts the language that it probably is. Mastodon requires you go out of your way to set your language, and apparently a lot of Japanese and German speaking "How to set up Mastodon" guides are skipping over that important detail.

Another problem is that hashtags are abysmal at context. I want to see some bootyholes, no I do not want to see Greg's hairy Italian ass nor do I want to hear people ranting about how their least favorite politician is a total jerk, and I SURE AS HELL DONT WANT TO SEE "barely legal" shit thank GOD for hashtag blocking!!! Being able to subscribe to hashtags is great but it needs a basic filtering system on a hash-tag level.

There's also the problem that the only people who hashtag properly are the bots, so your feed is like 90% bots. Hashtags just suck and it's ridiculous that mastodon didn't learn from twitter phasing them out as a focus and basically recreated early twitter without the algorithms.

Mastodon users hates ice cream, that's all you need to know.

because you touch yourself

It also has shitposting!

I think it depends on the instance you're using. The one I'm on is very active. 🤷