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 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
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.
There’s people who want to follow other people because you can follow specific associations, independent journalists, etc. If you are like that Mastodon will help with that but if you prefer broader topics no matter the source you have Lemmy. This are two distinct social media which belong to two distinct groups as other mentioned like microblogging and a more standard forum.
I prefer Lemmy because I like to follow topics and I get more involved in the discussions but sometimes I want to check on someone and the best way is to go to a Mastodon like platform.
I mean you don’t need to use each social media every day, some will fit more your personality and you will use that more but that doesn’t mean you can’t open the other one from time to time.
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.
