I had been spending quite some time on mastodon, but lately realized that it just isn’t for me.
Mastodon is very focused on individuals, not as much on content. I’m not saying there isn’t a need for mastodon, and I’m happy it’s there, but my main use case is contacting (semi) public figures or software-support there, which happens rarely. Curating a feed that is both interesting to me and “high quality” without being overrun doesn’t seem feasible.
Lemmy is much more focused on content. You don’t follow people, you follow topics or interests and get the things surfaced that the most people in that interest group appreciate. The discussions work much better (Twitter-like reply’s are just one huge bag of trash). It also doesn’t matter who the people are behind the content, as long as it’s interesting it will find an audience.
Just something that I’ve been thinking about. Any thoughts on this?
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.