Yeah same here, Reddit is my mindless scrolling app of choice, not Twitter, so when I tried to use Mastodon I just kinda stood there not knowing what to do

I love being able to read and immerse myself is specific communities and whatnot, and specifically I love Reddit for the discourse, people posting in a community, replying to posts, and replaying to those replies, and so on

So Lemmy has just become my jam, so happy that Reddit has an open source federated alternative now, even if they reverse their API debacle I'm still gonna keep using this app

I never really liked Twitter as a concept. It feels like it's built on an "old man yells at cloud" concept where people just shout their thoughts and nobody gains anything from it.

By comparison forums are there to foster discussions and communities. I thought Mastodon would be better but I spent 5 minutes and it's exactly the same nonsense.

They're different kinds of experiences.

Forum-type things like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker news, Reddit, etc. put the focus on the topic or community.

Micro-blog type things like Twitter, Mastodon put the focus on individuals.

If you want to see what your favourite author is posting about, or what your favourite musician is working on, or maybe behind the scenes pictures from a sporting event, microblogging platforms are great for that. Journalists also loved them because they could follow specific other journalists or other key people in the area they cared about, and get direct info from that source.

OTOH, if what you care about is a certain topic (F1 racing, beebop jazz, etc.) then forum-style platforms are better because the focus is the topic rather than the individuals.

I like Mastodon, but I like Lemmy more. That said, I liked Reddit a lot more than Twitter so it makes sense I'd prefer Lemmy. I'd rather follow topics than people, and Mastodon/Twitter are about following people (yes you can subscribe to hashtags on Mastodon, but it isn't the same).

That said, I still have and use both.

I tried Mastadon too, it didn't gel with me. Turns out I don't care to follow people. I follow topics.

Is this so hard for big tech to understand?

Mastodon is WAY better if you follow tags. that said, I am very optimistic of Lemmy, it just needs a quality app.

Micro blogging like Mastodon I like more for following the personalities. I don't have a big attention seeking personality so I do not get a lot of followers on that type of social media. I am more of a reply guy so Lemmy style content aggregator with comments I am able to participate more in.

I've been thinking that it is probably easier to move a community from a platform like Reddit to the Fediverse than it is from Twitter. I have used both Twitter and Reddit a lot, but have moved off Twitter and now use Mastodon. Mastodon works pretty well for me, but it's taken a lot of work to get there, and there are parts of the communities (mostly related to my work) I want to connect with that just don't exist on Mastodon.

But the big difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter/Mastodon is that on Reddit/Lemmy I am interested in communities for topics that are mostly hobbies/entertainment etc. for me, so I don't really care about who I'm interacting with... I can't really name more than a handful of regular users or mods on the Reddit subs I've been using for more than a decade. But it's not really important for interacting there, because it's about interacting with people who have an interest in a particular topic no matter who they are. On Twitter/Mastodon (at least how I use it), the specific people I'm interacting with are more important.

So it seems the "lock in" of Reddit is weaker than Twitter, and I think it'll be quicker to establish communities here. A community on Lemmy with a few hundred people contributing (posts/comments) is already pretty successful and enjoyable. It doesn't matter that the equivalent community on Reddit has over a million people (and in fact it's often better if it's smaller!).

That weaker lock in and the fact that Reddit seems to be massively undervaluing the contribution mods and third-party app devs make to the platform make me think Reddit is going to quickly regret this whole fiasco.

I kind of see Mastodon as a Twitter replacement and Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. Each has specific use cases. I can see both platforms having value in my online engagement.

I'm gonna be honest Lemmy feels like a very chill place unlike Reddit or Facebook, it feels like defusing a bomb when talking on certain subreddits

Yeah in general, I like forums better than the format Twitter is in. I like topic-based discussions more than discussions spawned from short, potentially out-of-context messages.

Yeah, so far I fucking love lemmy! Open source software for the fucking win!

Damn I really miss forums.

I had the greatest times in the internet 20 years ago in forums where you could be part of something that felt like a community built over years. Found some long lasting friendships on forums. Sadly then came myspace and facebook and caused every single forum I used to die.

Honestly the fediverse somewhat can replace that because the instances emulate that feeling of community a little bit.

Another Reddit refugee here: lemmy makes much more sense to my brain than mastodon ever did. So far, this has huge promise.

Well yeah, Lemmy is to Reddit what Mastodon is to Twitter. Never cared for Twitter pre or post-Elon.

Similar. For me it's almost a drop-in replacement for Reddit, while mastodon not really

I'm from Mastodon and trying Lemmy to explore more of the fediverse, liking it so far too 😃. My Mastodon feed is almost all politics so I'm liking the different content on here.

I do too. Mastodon is great software, but I’ve never been much of a user of the micro blogging format. The Reddit/hacker news format has been my preference for many years.

Lemmy and Reddit promote engagement, discourse and even arguments... ok, especially arguments.

Mastodon feels like a list of billboards that I am disconnected from.

"Oh, that's news"

But no one talks between eachother about anything. I almost feel like the nature of the layout of Twitter and it's alternatives are almost by design to make the users a little more self serving.

Mastodon has every user standing on a soapbox yelling at crowds, Lemmy is more of a public forum.

Similarly, I wish Matrix/Element would grow in popularity to compete with Discord, who will also eventually be pursuing and IPO and will allow enshittification to swallow them whole.

the nice thing about the fediverse is that you can still interact with the other platforms if you so choose, so you aren't limited! I'm glad you found something that works for you and i hope you have a great time :)

Yep, Same here! When things went south with Twitter, I tried switching to Mastodon, but after several months, I haven't become fond of it. Its interface is so terrible and difficult to navigate. When I heard of Lemmy as an alternative to Reddit, the first thing that came to my mind was, 'Oh, please don't be like Mastodon...' and I'm glad that it is not! I like the fact that it is kinda' similar to Reddit (interface-wise), but at the same time, it is decentralized, which means it is (hopefully) going in the right direction.

Personally I find Kbin more usable (while still being reddit-like) as it also has functionality letting you follow on normal microblogging content from Mastodon and other places, making it more intertwined with the whole fediverse.

Strongly agree. Mastodon is alright and I use it a little, but the twitter-type format never really worked for me. I feel like when I have to follow individual people I usually end up either following no one or being forced to follow people who post things that interest me sometimes but a lot of the time post things that really don't. Following particular topics or threads just seems much more natural to me; I can look at exactly what interests me and nothing more.

This does feel a lot like the reddit I missed, only better. I will also agree that I find myself more likely to engage here, versus reddit where I exclusively lurked.

It’s quite interesting as I think the twitter migration put the focus on mastodon for a while and this place became quieter and then Reddit didn’t want to be left out so the spotlight is now here and kbin. If only Instagram could join the fun pixelfed would get a bump.

I think the main difference comes down to the sorting algorithms. In Lemmy we get the organic content sorting done by collective human appreciation or lack thereof of said content (↑, ↓). Generally better stuff rises to the top, and worse stuff sinks to the bottom. You can still see either if you like by changing the order. That coupled with sorting by community does a great job at sifting through the noise. In Mastodon you have hashtags that can serve as communities but there's no organic sorting within that. If you subscribe to #Linux, you'll get pretty much everything with #Linux, whether one or a thousand people found it valuable.

Either it was supper overwhelming with meme posts or NSFW, or it was too chill to the point of nothing. Or, it was hyperfocused like FOSS/Linux and became uninteresting after awhile.

I’ve never been able to find the meme posts on mastodon, therein lies part of its core issues, federation makes discoverability iffy at best. It hasn’t yet reached mass yet.

I don't mind a community having low amount of content. It's easy to just join multiple and hop around. I don't mind a UI not entirely matching my preference, that stuff is "matter of time".

But Mastodon made it VERY hard to find the little content their communities did have. They have an anti-Trending philosophy, and that drove me, and most people I know, away. When I joined, they didn't even have proper tag searching, and to this day, the activity in a tag is still reported wrongly. When asked, I got aggressively told off that Text Search is evil and I'm evil for asking and no, I didn't even talk about twitter but I'm evil for even daring to make requests even lightly resembling a Twitter user's UX preferences (Aka: Discoverability and UX). I just wanted to hear a "oh that's broken and being worked on" but no, it was always a "no, we don't like that" instead.

No such thing here. I wanted to find the gaming subs, I found the gaming subs. I wanted to find a desolate abandoned community for Dota 2, bam, I found the desolate abandoned community for dota 2. Within 2 minutes I was on grounds with /c/PatientGamers.

It got slightly better. But won't ever fully fix itself. To me, and to a couple colleagues, Mastodon was a bad website, with bad gatekeepers and a bad advert for the Fediverse. I don't care about it and I hope Rhynodon some day comes, implements text search and steals all their users.

@DidacticDumbass I love liking this from Mastodon and the fact that you are more comfortable with a different platform interoperable with the rest of the Fediverse

I'm Gen Z and when I was little my parents were (rightfully) very careful with how much time I spent on the internet. Even so, I saw from a distance the old internet, where forums were a thing and you could find lots of cool websites that people made for reasons that weren't limited to promoting or selling something.

When I discovered Reddit it was like I could somehow experience that time, but for many the decline had already started.

I love interacting with people, asking and answering questions, discovering and making others discover new things, but I just can't stand feeling like everything and everyone is trying to sell me something anymore.

Now that I'm here, I feel like this could be the place, at least for a while.

I think I will explore the other fedisites like Plemora or Calckey to see if I like it better.

Servers running these apps connect to the same fediverse Mastodon servers connect to. As does Lemmy. All these apps just give you different ways to view the same social network, so which software you use makes less difference to what you can see than which server you use. Because there is no global view of the network, what you'll find in hashtag searches or federated timelines in the micro-posting apps (Mastodon, Pler/Akkoma Miss/CalcKey) depends on which accounts are being followed from the server hosting your account.

I'm new to Lemmy's way of viewing the 'verse, so I'm not sure what the equivalent is here. But I think what @dave describes in this thread about Communities hosted on other Lemmy servers taking a while to show up in searches here is relevant: https://lemmy.nz/comment/28480