Lemmy naturally concentrates unconnected users with similar interests thanks to reddit-style communities. Mastodon follows the Twitter style where you have to find and follow individual users to get their microblog content, and its harder to isolate certain topics or interests except across the entire service via hashtags. Individual users on their own are very uninteresting and bland.
Lemmy has fewer users but they as a whole generate more active content than Mastodon does thanks to community specialization, since the Twitter style posts require some critical mass of users following to generate interesting discussion (something that basically never happens unless you're already a celebrity)

So many posts perfectly summarising why I've always preferred the reddit format over twitter. On one you follow topics, on the other you follow people. I prefer to hear a wide range of views on one topic rather than one persons views on different topics.

The twitter format makes it feel like everyone is speaking from a soap box at all times, and people aren’t their best selves from a soap box.

I always hated the Twitter format, so Mastodon never appealed to me in the first place

I believe it's how the data is structured.

Lemmy is focused on themes and topics, with the "user" not being the focus (you can't even follow a user on Lemmy).

That's reversed on Mastodon, with focus on the users you follow, and the topics (hashtags, groups, etc) being optional.

For some people, Lemmy is better, for others, Mastodon or other microblog platform. The fact that both can exist in the same network is magical to me.

I personally would rather follow topics than people. I don't know or care what the founder of Adobe had for breakfast. I like the idea of community aggregate voting to drive an interesting feed. Maybe Mastodon can do that better than I know because I only gave it a few days... but I was nowhere near what I wanted after a few days where Lemmy was good from day 0.

The difference is mastadon is how interesting your friends are. Lenny is how interesting the entire lemmy populous is.

The main factor is discoverability.

There are no shortage of creative or funny people on Mastodon, however, Mastodon's feed algorithm do not allow them to be discovered unless you happen to stumble upon them by happenstance, whereas it is quite easy to be seen on Lemmy by posting good content: it's rare when I don't get any upvotes or downvotes on a comment here, and good replies are fairly common, so the interaction quality here is generally higher.

Microblogging versus content aggregation with comments. Two different things that are technically similar enough to share a protocol.

On Masto, it's more about being a person saying something into the ether. Lemmy is more about adding content to communities, subscribing to the ones you like, and then talking about it there.

I find the microblog model to be fairly limiting. It's good for posting quips, memes, and news, but it's terrible for having any sort of a meaningful interactions. A forum like Lemmy facilitates much more interesting discussions.

Mastodon is just a bunch of news articles and people talking like robots. I try to engage and there's fucking nothing I care about. Anything actually interesting is like half a thought. Like they started talking about a topic but didn't get to the point before they decided to hit post. Posts from popular accounts talk about electoral politics in a weird clipped manner like a newspaper but even more boring.

It's harder to find the good stuff on Mastodon because you have to follow individuals or novelty accounts.

They don't have beans on Mastodon.

There's a reason that I'm not a Twitter, X or Mastodon user. I'm not that kind of person. I think they should hand out free methadone if you can prove you're an X user.

Lemmy (and Reddit) is separated into distinct communities too. You can avoid certain areas easily.

I still don't know how to find people with similar interests on mastodon. There may be lots of interesting stuff happening there but how would I know? Plus posting on there feels like shouting into the void since I only have a handful of followers.

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You're clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the "shitposting" of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it's mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don't be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn't know as I block all news communities I can find -- I just don't see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be "productive"), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who's been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)

Mastodon went in two seriously wrong directions, but seems to remedy them which is difficult. First they have no proper quote supporting and failing to realize all communication works this way on the internet. Be it comments on articles, all the newspapers quoting others and thus creating those articles etc. Second the lack of algorithms due to a misguided opinion they are inherently evil. What we got instead is a random feed of random messages where a news like structure like on Twitter is not possible. Extremely important events are buried behind tons of crappy posts. And the only region for whom the explore tab is working is America as nothing is localized. Also scrolling through the feed doesn't tell you what seems to garner attraction by the number of comments. So most clicks are wasted on deadend topics.

Just guessing here, but Lemmy is generally content focused, where it feels like mastodon and twitter have more of a focus on the interaction between users. This would mean that Mastodon needs a lot of active users to function, where a lemmy community can be largely carried by just a few really active posters.

Because both of us are here! And we are fun people, won't you agree?

Just kidding!

Cheers, have fun.

Everything I’ve seen on Mastodon is either very serious or cat pics. There’s also this dungeons and dragons AI game that I sometimes get sucked into.

Because you’re here.

I'm always surprised at the lack of interactions on Mastadon. Most toots seem to never get a single like or comment, even from users with lots of followers. Always makes me feel like I'm missing something.

Up/downvotes help us all essentially be eachothers “algorithm” so its easier to find interesting stuff. Also comment sections are the best part of Lemmy style websites while mastodon is a mess to follow because the default app doesnt even have threaded replies, theres no downvotes, and you cant subscribe to a post to get notifications or come back to it later and posts dont appear on google searches so a post doesn’t get any use after a day or two. Lemmy posts bring me benefits months/years after theyre made because they appear when I google for information

I share the same experience. Lemmy imitates Reddit, Mastodon imitates Twitter. The concept of Twitter might be more reliant on algorithms than that of Reddit, algorithms that Mastodon mostly lacks. Bluesky is a Twitter alternative designed for federation that has algorithms, and it appears more lively to me. The same might be true for Threads but I won't test this out.

Like others have said, the community aspect of Lemmy allows me to follow things I enjoy, not people who may or may not post something I like. Additionally, even a simple algorithm that sorts content based on perceived relevancy makes it so I can see the stuff I want to see first (though someone did point out that that isn't entirely fair, but the "New" sort does provide that experience).

Lemmy is working as interests based discussion platform and mastodon as gossip based. Interests are always better than people.

Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.

Mastodon feels like a torrent of random unrelated comments drowing out anything that might be interesting. I tried it, I don't see any value in it. Even for following friends it's unusable, there is the one that posts three times a day and the one that posts once every three weeks, there is no way to ever see one of his posts, unless I specifically go to his profile to look. I've given up on Mastodon.

I think you’re just in a weird corner of mastodon? My mastodon feed is way more popping than on here.

@bruhbeans I think people feel more uninhibited on a platform like Lemmy, Typically, when you post on Mastodon your post will show up in the timeline for everyone who follows you and if not Unlisted, in public timelines as well. There'slemmy-worldxposure for just responding to something simple and niche. In the lemmy-world, people follow communities and view threads, not individual accounts, so they aren't typically exposed to the random commentary people have.

Because Twitter-like services are not fun.... I never thought they were fun. :)

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.