Fediverse

Mastodon doesn't have Likes at all.

The star you're referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.

This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can't happen.

Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.

So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it's external focus.

> 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.

Basically this all over.

IMO, Mastodon is a paradox that the fediverse needs to move on from. It is not an alternative to Twitter, but, its popularity rests on this very perception. And so we have a dominant platform, that most consider to actually just be the whole fediverse, whose dominance is in many ways arbitrary or luck of circumstance. Which is fine ... that's how things happen. But the sooner we move on from Mastodon dominating the fediverse the better.

The way I've put it previously is that Mastodon is an awkward middle ground that actually doesn't work too well for many people. It's neither particularly safe/healthy or particularly engaging or interesting. And so many BIPOC avoid it while there are LGBTQ folks who openly consider it problematic and are ready to jump ship whenever necessary, while journalists and anyone who's looking to form wide networks (without being influencers or doing anything for-profit) don't see the point. In many ways, it's the white/western suburbia of social media ... and while that's a nice place to visit or be sometimes, there's a good reason to not live there or be there all the time, especially when online.

On top of all that, it's actually a pretty simple/brutalist take on what social media can be, to the point of being unnecessarily backward. And yet, by the numbers, it is basically the fediverse (like literally ~88% of active users are on mastodon!).

The fediverse can do better. Will do better, and already has.

• There's firefish (and Misskey too, from which it was forked, and Iceshrimp and Hajkey which are forks of firefish)
  • see firefish.social, nice examples: lead devs personal page
  • Or, how far the special form of markdown can be taken, collected in another feature called Clips which are collections of posts: Clips of cool MFM(misskey flavoured markdown).
• There's Akkoma
• Then there's Lemmy and kbin.

Yoo, people who say "oh my, mastodon doesn't have likes and algo and that's what makes it perfect", are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don't sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative

Personally, I’m happy with both. Lemmy and Mastodon are far from perfect and both feel sorta beta, though Mastodon is further along.

Search is weak on both platforms, imo, but I expect it will improve eventually.

You mention favorite counts only being your instance, but same is true for community subscribers here.

Also landing on other instances from outside links can be confusing to find the same content in your instance (Mastodon and Lemmy).

Federation does make things more complicated. But it beats centralization.

In the end, it comes down to your personal end use and preferences.

Personally, I like Mastodon for conversations and I like Lemmy for community building - I mod !alternativenation@lemmy.world - and that works for me. 💕

(Though I’d kill for some consistent performance from Lemmy after trying to comment 3 times)

Huh I thought people on Mastodon just tended to prefer “retweets” over Likes haha

Hear hear! I thought I didn't like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. "Oh, I can't view other instances' local timelines without making accounts on them? What's even the point of federation then?" But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it's not the fediverse's fault, Mastodon just doesn't have a clear audience.

And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon's features are "privacy-focused", but I think it does TOO good a job, it's so private that you can't find anything!

Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.

Turns out it was just a software quirk.

Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it's not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.

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

As long as he doesn't submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it's not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.

1. This isn't just a Mastodon problem, all fediverse softwares struggle to keep an accurate tally of faves/likes/whatevers on posts from remote instances

2. It doesn't look like this anymore on mastodon.social

3. Search isn't free so it's up to the admins to decide how good/powerful they want their search bar to be.

4. It shows all followees/followers of a user if said user is local, but if the user is remote, it will only show local followees/followers of that user because knowing what remote accounts follow what remote users also isn't free.

So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?

I think fundamentally Mastodon can't work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can't do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don't care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn't need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy's decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn't have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.