Seeing how good Lemmy is makes me frustrated with Mastodon (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by Shaggy@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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My Problems with Mastodon

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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[-] ren@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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)

[-] dan@sffa.community 9 points 1 year ago

What if I tell you all of the points you mentioned are in Lemmy too?

[-] QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’m using Mammoth to interact with Mastodon and other than the likes, reposting difference that’s made to diminish the echo chamber, it works very much like Twitter. Searching is great and the app works really well and looks great. Oh and the content is of much higher quality on the regular.

[-] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

This is a feature, not a bug. Clout-chasing is what kills corporate/surveillance social media. Get over fantasy Internet points and start providing and consuming actual content.
I'd like to see "trending" removed entirely from Mastodon. I don't give a shit what people at large think is important or cool or funny or whatnot. I care what my social circle thinks is important or cool or funny or whatnot. And for that? I've got my feed. Get over algorithmically spoon-fed statements of what you should care about and, you know, interact. On social media.
The search bar works, just not in the way any sane person would expect it to work. It's badly designed, badly named, and badly implemented.
This is an unfortunate side effect of distributed social media. Federation is already a huge bottleneck for the Fediverse. Adding social graph follows to the list of things being transmitted around willy-nilly is a bandwidth killer. Any social media that is truly distributed (read: not BlueSky) will have the same issue.