I prefer Lemmy over Mastodon for the same reason I preferred Reddit (pre-APIpocalypse) over Twitter (pre-Musk) - the ability to subscribe to specific communities with similar interests. Try as I might in Mastodon with selective subscriptions to certain posters I still find myself scrolling through stuff I have no interest in hoping for a nugget of interest.

Literally I have no idea what you are talking about...

ya wanna know what my feed has been all day over on mastodon...

gay people tooting ":3" and just that, hundreds of them.. ddos the fedi with ":3"...

you see what you follow, follow cooler people. It's not mastodon it's a you problem. Should follow more gay and trans and neurodivrergent furries. It's a party over there every day I love it

This isn't my experience at all. Mastodon feels more or less exactly like Twitter-circa 2022 to me (just with fewer right-wing trolls) - still fun and vibrant and also informative.

Lemmy feels like a collection of weird freaks trying desperately to be cool. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of them. But I would not call the vibe here "vibrant, active, lighthearted, fun" or certainly "powerful."

My expirience is similar, I prefer Lemmy but I see the potential of platform like Mastodon or Misskey or Pixelfeld for interraction with artists. In that sense you can use list to properly organize your feed and don't clog your timeline feed. Plus for discovering new people you follow hashtags and some instances let you set up antennas to catch post with specific words (iceshrimp rules!).

I honestly think the tiny fraction of MAU might be the reason. Something like once you exceed a Dunbar Number of contacts in a community it starts to go downhill.

I think it's the gamification. Mastodon degamifies Twitter in a way Lemmy can't really do with the classic Reddit system.

Votes go up, votes go down, you can see people winning and losing here. It's fun, even if it's in a bad way.

I need to follow specific users on Mastodon to tailor my experience. On Lemmy, I follow entire communities where people can engage, all grouped by posts. It feels way less chaotic.

I know I could follow tags on Mastodon, but IMO their discoverability is even worse than communities, and if someone decides to spam a tag with irrelevant content there's not much I can do but to block the account.

With communities, there's at least some moderation happening.

But then maybe it's my own bias, I always preferred interacting on Reddit vs Twitter.

Mastodon is basically just a bunch of guilty liberals who feel bad that their baby had became a nazi, but are not willing to take the steps necessary to grow from there. Lemmy comes from redditors who saw the platform as always being full of overt displays of nazism and thus were able to appropriately grow from the experience and free themselves from its influence.

When you look back at your reddit days you are ashamed, because you now know why it was wrong. When mastodon users look back at twitter they reminisce with fondness of their times hanging out with war criminals and retweeting right wing sources that agreed with them.

Try following George Takei, Star Trek Minus Context, and/or the various cat accounts, e.g Cats of Yore.

From my experience, Mastodon is limited by interaction being more limited. On Twitter, I used to have the luxury of not needing to always know who I wanted to interact with. I could follow 30 celebrities I was interested in, go to their posts and find a plethora of people to interact with about something I cared about. That got me started until I found corners of Twitter that I liked.

Here on lemmy, there's a front page that's bound to have something worthwhile.

Both are helped by instances. If you're in the right instance for you, you already have an okay starting point.

@bruhbeans RNG. Also "fun" is subjective. Some of it is just cultural too. Mastodon has a certain “vibe" that has persisted since its early days while Lemmy's vibe is more imported from the more fun/wild days of Reddit.

Maybe it is the...

You go into All feed and despite your language being set to only English it's just a massive wall of Japanese text. Lemmy has the decency to automatically tag posts the language that it probably is. Mastodon requires you go out of your way to set your language, and apparently a lot of Japanese and German speaking "How to set up Mastodon" guides are skipping over that important detail.

Another problem is that hashtags are abysmal at context. I want to see some bootyholes, no I do not want to see Greg's hairy Italian ass nor do I want to hear people ranting about how their least favorite politician is a total jerk, and I SURE AS HELL DONT WANT TO SEE "barely legal" shit thank GOD for hashtag blocking!!! Being able to subscribe to hashtags is great but it needs a basic filtering system on a hash-tag level.

There's also the problem that the only people who hashtag properly are the bots, so your feed is like 90% bots. Hashtags just suck and it's ridiculous that mastodon didn't learn from twitter phasing them out as a focus and basically recreated early twitter without the algorithms.

Plenty of reasons already shared, I just want to add that I felt (still feel) the same about Reddit vs Twitter.

Mastodon users hates ice cream, that's all you need to know.

It also has shitposting!

because you touch yourself