I don’t have any issues with it. I use Ice Cubes, it’s awesome.

Try firefish

My Mastodon search has never worked either, Lemmy is a much better Reddit alternative than Mastodon is a Twitter alternative

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.

I like it as a concept but it’s got some growing to do.

I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.

I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.

I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.

I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing

I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.

My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).

I think you have to factor in the ideological motivation here. Many have tried to criticise the team for being socialists or weaponise it as a means of trying to get Lemmy not to take off, but I argue that it is because Lemmy is run by ideologically committed people that it exceeded your expectations.

Lemmy’s goal is disrupting corporate control of what used to be communal spaces online. This is ideologically motivated by the socialist beliefs held by its development team.

Whether you agree with socialists or not politically, for a platform like Lemmy this motivation is very very powerful and plays a significant part.

The other side of this is that having known and occupied socialist spaces with Dessalines for close to a decade now he is one of the hardest working socialists online.

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

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 [email protected] - and that works for me. 💕

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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!