Even with growing pains accommodating an influx of new users, Lemmy has made it clear that a federated social media site can be nearly as good as the original thing. I joined Lemmy, and it exceeded my expectations for a Reddit alternative run by an independent team.

These expectations were originally pretty low when Mastodon, the popular federated Twitter alternative, was the only federated social media I had experience with. After using Lemmy, Mastodon seems to be missing basic features. I initially believed these were just shortcomings of federated social media.

Likes aren't counted by users outside your instance, and replies don't seem to be counted at all (beyond 0, 1, 1+), leading to posts that look like they have way more boosts (retweets) than likes or replies:

This incentivizes people to just gravitate toward the biggest instance more than people already do. My guess is that self-hosting a mastodon instance would also not be ideal, since the only likes you'll see are your own.
There's really only one effective ways to find popular or 'trending' posts. There's the explore tab which has 'posts', and 'tags' sections.

The 'posts' section shows some trending posts across your instance and all the instances that it's federated with, this is the one I use it the most.

The 'tags' section is a lot like the trending tab on Twitter, but it's reserved just for hashtags, which I guess isn't a huge deal, but it feels like a downgrade. However, I do like the trend line it shows next to each tag!

The 'Local' and 'Federated' tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don't warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.
The search bar basically doesn't work, is this just me???
This one is more minor and more specific to a Twitter alternative, but when looking at a user's follows, you'll only see the one's on your home instance but for some reason this rule doesn't apply to followers.

From what I've heard, a lot of these issues are intentional in order to create a healthier social media experience. Things like less focus on likes, reduces a hivemind mentality, addiction, things like that (I couldn't find a source for this, if anyone has one confirming or disproving this please lmk).

Why this is a Problem

Mastodon seems to have two goals: To be an example of how a federated alternative to Twitter can work well, and to be a healthier social media experience. It's not obvious, but I think these goals conflict with each other. A lot of the features that are removed in the pursuit of a healthier social media will be perceived as the shortcomings of federation as a concept.

In my eyes, Mastodon's one main goal should be proving federated social media as a whole to the public, by being a seamless, familiar, full-featured alternative to Twitter. For me, Lemmy has done that for Reddit, upvotes are counted normally, you can see trending posts locally and globally same with communities, and the search function works! All its shortcomings aren't design flaws, and I fully expect them to be fixed down the road as it matures.

As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.

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[–] ivy@fedi196.gay 4 points 1 year ago

I'm on glitch soc instead of mastodon and I've liked it a lot
it pretty much fixes most of my biggest gripes with mastodon and I hide the counters anyway because the number isn't very important to me

[–] pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago

3rd party exists

[–] REdOG@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Meh The modlog is so active it's dead

[–] salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 2 points 1 year ago

To me they're two different things, to be used in different ways, which is a good thing, I suppose.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

The mastodon community is so incredibly bad, they're the biggest downfall. They also actively push for development of harmful features that kills adoption. If you disagree, you have a "growth" mindset which is somehow bad, and must be a silicon valley tech bro that hates lgbtia. Thank god Lemmy is a good example that discoverbility doesn't need to be broken with ActivityPub.

Also they really need an algo, I don't care how much they preach that it's better without. It's just incredibly boring and hides high quality content without one.

[–] moitoi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I don't have your issues with it. I have a ton of interactions on Mastodon and everything is clear.

The problem people have with mastodon is how they see it. You wrote all your rant about mastodon being a copy of Twitter with the Twitter terminology. Mastodon is not Twitter.

I did the same mistake at the beginning. I thought it was a federate Twitter. It made it empty and frustrating to use. I didn't understand what people do there.

I give it a second try. This time, I took another way to understand it. Instead of comparing to Twitter and thinking at a federated Twitter, I took it like a new experience.

After that, I discover the philosophy behind mastodon and it's completely different. It's not Twitter or a Twitter like. People are nice and really active.

The number of reply doesn't matter that much. What is important are the boosts. People need to find groups boosting the toots. You need to mention the group when you toot and you need to follow groups. The second is hashtags to follow and search for. But hashtags aren't the primary thing to follow.

Then, you begin to find accounts to follow. But keep in mind the philosophy is different and you won't use it as Twitter.

[–] theothermatt_b@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure that thing about likes, boosts, and favorites not showing up as a count is just a setting. I see full counts.

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