What's difficult?

So I'm on both and I work in tech. I'm technically capable, e.g. I verified my Mastodon account with my website. Neither Mastodon not Lemmy is anywhere near ready for non technical users.

Mastodon

Hell of a job picking an instance. Confusing to log in because I have to remember the instance not the service. Instance is all local stuff, global stuff is by default garbage.

I signed up to Mastodon a few months back. Most of the people I followed on Twitter didn't. Not surprising really given how confusing and complicated it is. I chose a server because someone I followed recommended it. I found most people posting less and less frequently, apart from the instance admin, they seemed to post books worth every singled day and I had to mute them. Then it got really quiet and I saw something about the server admin stepping down. At which point I learned that due to some ridiculous drama involving something the admin of my mastodon instance apparently said that some other instance admin didn't like, the whole instance/domain was 'silenced'. In other words 'the hell with you' to me because of something I wasn't even aware of, let alone involved with. Absolutely childish that something like that can even happen, and even better, it seems people often can't figure out how to make it 'un-happen'.

None of this covers mobile app issues

At this point mastodon has failed as an alternative to Twitter for me. There's about 3 non-twitter-repost-bot posters left in my feed, all either second rate or also posting the same on twitter.

Lemmy

A bit better than Mastodon but comparable issues with picking an instance. Dscoverability is slightly better because I can search for topics. I've had to create a login on a second instance because my first pick, and then my second pick, both:

• De-Federated a number of other instances
• Were de-federated but a number of other instances
• Have been suffering repeated uptime issues due to DDOS

So now I'm on my 3rd Lemmy login and I spent half an hour yesterday using someone's python script to back up my subs and resubscribe with my next account...

None of this covers mobile app issues

Overall

It's close, really close, and it could work but it's tough on Lemmy and missing on Mastodon