Having tried all three, its a stark difference in how much more social Lemmy is comparatively. Its not even close. Almost all posts I’ve encountered on lemmy have interaction; whereas, more often than not, posts on the other two platforms have no interaction. Wonder what the driving factor is behind this difference?
I do have and use Mastodon. But more and more I keep thinking that traditional blogs + rss are a better fit for me.
What’s the diff? I have a web site that functions like a traditional blog, offers RSS, but it’s an ActivityPub application that participates in the Fediverse. Doesn’t that describe every Mastodon-alike?
The thing about Mastodon is that you have to really heavily curate.
On Forum Blogs, like here, if you go to All, you will see articles, questions, images, and communities.
On Micro Blogs, like Mastodon, if you go to all you will see articles, but the rest will mostly be international thoughts of the day, some of which may be questions, non-sequitors, and images.
Not so much the communities, by default.
That doesn’t mean that Mastodon/the like can’t, you just have to curate it a bit more. I followed #Bloomscrolling and it brings tons of nature in my feed, it’s lovely. But if you follow like, @GamingFeed it’s just reposted content that looks for keywords – my Helldivers 2 posts were being promoted but also random articles and posts from others. Somewhat useful for finding articles, but hollow because it’s just a bot I’m certain.
I also find that while there are communities on mastodon, they’re pretty niche so you end up limited to roughly the same things here, tech either hardware or software, gaming or relatives like figures, nature, or politics (though I’ve found Mastodon is fairly less political on a default account. Wasn’t using it much though so I may have missed it entirely).
Meanwhile on Lemmy and the like, you pretty much just get shown communities. We all know ich_el or whatever that German meme one is, we all have passed by 196, that sort of thing doesn’t appear on Mastodon so much.
That said, I do see mastodon accounts commenting on posts on Lemmy, so it’s also possible to mix them. I will say, generally the mastodon comments do not go into as much thoughtful detail in response on these articles, but that could very well be an instance limitation (some have 40k characters, some have 500-2000).
So there are some fairly large differences and while they can technically accomplish the same thing, there can a bit of a cultural difference between the two formats. And as you probably know, default instances also can change this experience on both – Solarpunk.moe is awesome and well moderated and is focused on solarpunk, mastodon.social is pretty large and chaotic. Lemmy is the same way, of course, slrpnk.net is fairly small compared to the major instances and the home feed reflects that
Longer posts. More control over formating. Easier to post more types of media.
And maybe it’s less of a “social” media, and more of a “personal” project.
Maybe it’s 90s nostalgia talking, but I miss those cool personal webpages.