this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Mastodon has imo dogshit discoverability. For Lemmy it feels like posts across the federated instances are all elegantly aggregated onto my front page. I can also easily subscribe to subs on other instances.
On Mastodon the client has to work around the backend to do simple stuff like aggregate the posts of multiple instances. Most stuff in the federated feed is pretty much random and the local feed is restricted to your account's instance.
User discoverability is also awful. If I dont have a user's exact name and instance it's nigh impossible to find them outside of my own instance. Searching lemmy is much more effective when it comes to external instances.
Mastodon is trying too hard to be a twitter clone in some ways I feel. If it had instance subscriptions a hit like how lemmy lets you subscribe to subs it would be way more useful. Right now it feels like everyone is shouting into the void.
As an active person on both (and a mod here), Mastodon is definitely the most active. Yes, you have to follow liberally, dive into reblogs and follow some more, also cruising the Explore/trending section helps but it doesn't take long to build up a super fun feed. People engage alot, no algorithms, it's all just live and great.
Lemmy "elegance" isn't that elegant. I've had to work with admins to help break through issues of posts federating around, but it's getting better. I'm finally getting things going pretty smooth and my community is getting momentum, !AlternativeNation@lemmy.world but it's been a very slow, buggy, and painful process. One thing that helped was posting to my Lemmy community exclusively through my Mastodon account for a while to help bring people over.
Search is a wash. Mastodon, I can put a link to a post in the search and it pops up, can't do that here. But Lemmy has better search for just text.
You see? Both are nowhere near perfect, both are flawed, and both are great! They serve very different purposes and don't compete. They complement each other. I'm super happy we have both and absolutely love building up this community supported DIY fediverse.
Exciting times ahead!