I’m trying to understand the way Mastodon works. Back in the day I started with IRC and then the many php-based forums and then reddit which led to lemmy. I never used twitter or similar platforms.
My understanding (and this is where I need help) is that all of the above are topic-based, whereas Mastodon is person-based? What I mean is that on lemmy I subscribe to things based on topic and I don’t really care about usernames or user profiles, I only care about discussing a topic. It seems to me like Mastodon is the opposite? You follow persons and what they might say about any topic?
Is there something I’m missing here? Are hashtags close enough to sorting it by topic that it works just like a topic based platform? Is this difference inherent or just in my head because I don’t understand Mastodon?
Lemmy is like reddit and Mastodon is like Twitter.
Mastodon is microblogging. As others have said, it’s similar to Twitter. Lemmy is a link aggregator with a comments/conversation section per link, like Slashdot, Digg or Reddit.
I think the thing that people forget to do with Mastodon is to follow hashtags. The feature wasn’t there early on but it’s been there for probably a year or more now. Then you block or mute the accounts you don’t want to see that post under those tags.
It’s a useful substitute for following accounts when you have no idea which accounts to follow. You can then curate and actually follow accounts whose content outside those hashtags also catches your eye.
On the link aggregators there are the groups which don’t exist on Mastodon, but that’s what hashtags are for, right? Marking the topic.
The only hard part about it for me is feeling bad about blocking innocent accounts.
Also worth mentioning is that Mbin instances exist, and that software is basically both Lemmy and Mastodon rolled into one site. The posts aren’t fully integrated though. You have to click something to view the microblog side of things and click something to go back.
How well do the hashtags work in practice on mastodon? Are they used as intended and actually useful?
I feel like less common or more specific hashtags tend to work better. If you try to follow common words like art or music or dogs, it can overwhelm your feed and a lot of it is mediocre. If you browse those tags, you might see more specific tags used along side them focusing on what you actually want.
I can only speak to the topics I followed on another account, but it provided plenty of reading for those topics. Whether it covered all possible posts and whether it works well for all topics, I couldn’t say.
It does kind of rely on people tagging things properly, which people might not do if they’re on a Mastodon instance specific to that topic. But then, they ought to know that those posts wouldn’t Federate well, and indeed, might not want them to.
Hashtags still only show you posts that are specifically addressed to users on your host site. They just act as a quick-search feature. You need some kind of “actor” to re-address things to people who aren’t following the OP in order to get true propagation across the network. This is what guppe groups do, and what Lemmy communities do.
You mostly understood it right.
I think of Mastodon/Twitter as essentially server-side RSS readers: you follow the sources you want to read, then are notified when they are posting something. If you don’t already have any followers, there is little point in posting anything there. The forum-like structure of Lemmy is a lot more suited for ordinary people to discuss topics they are interested in.
If you don’t already have any followers, there is little point in posting anything there.
See, I disagree. This may be true on the large Masto sites, but if you join an interest-first site, then the Local timeline is actually an ansynchronous chatroom filled with people with similar interests.
Fedi microblogs work really well for finding and connecting with people you have comminalities with when using small-to-medium sized sites. Much better than Lemmy, really, where the post content itself is the primary vehicle of interest, rather than the poster. The Reddit model is actually kind of shit for discussion, since it goes the extra mile to depersonalize the posts.
Lemmy is way better for content ingestion, while the microblogs are way better for socializing.
Assuming you’re not on Mast.soc, anyway.
Yes, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and all its other niche platforms are very much person based. They can still be topical, based on who that person is and what they post, but they have this self-centered drive that never made me click with any of them. Hashtags help with discovery since you can search and even subscribe / follow certain hashtags, or use them to block / filter certain topics. But there’s also often people who abuse that and just spam hashtags, or people who don’t tag their posts properly, which makes it a very flawed system imo.
Forums, Reddit, Lemmy, mbin (excluding the microblogging section), etc. are all topic based, and users are just contributing to those topics but ultimately not important as the person. That being said, some also allow you to follow the people directly as well, but at least for me that’s never been much of a thing.
mastodon is essentially ‘twitter’. also called ‘microblogging’. people post things that other people can see because they subscribe to ‘people’
the hashtags are supposed to be used to aggregate posts between all those different people to help find common posts.
lemmy does none of it, as it is not capable of ‘microblogging’
there are a few platforms that can do both the ‘forum based’ stuff (threadiverse) and the ‘twitter based stuff’ (microblog) like mbin
on my instance for example, you can follow people on mastodon and interact with all the lemmy content
