Calckey/Firefish (forked from the Japanese software Misskey, so I assume that one is similar) is basically Mastodon but cool. It fixes many of your problems. While it's not yet perfect (same issue with followers from other servers), there seems to be more going on.

As annoying as Jack Dorsey is, I have high hopes for BlueSky.

As long as he doesn't submit that protocol as ActivityPub 2.0 or whatever, it's not compatible with the wider fediverse, so not interesting.

Mastodon doesn't have Likes at all.

The star you're referring to is Favorite. Those go into your Favorite list. So you can refer back to them more easily.

I think fundamentally Mastodon can't work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can't do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don't care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn't need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy's decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn't have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.

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.

Oh, so that explains why the ratio of favorites/boosts is so low on mastodon. I thought it was just a culture thing, where people rarely left likes on posts.

Turns out it was just a software quirk.

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.

So users viewing this post on another instance will see the same exact comments and upvotes?

Watching Mastodon-stans defend the lack of search is like watching a cult-member explain an insane belief.

So far, Lemmy feels like the least cultish corner of the fediverse. That might be due t it's external focus.

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 this is very much a YMMV situation. I moved from twitter to mastodon and brands aside, all of the interesting people I followed are here. granted, I follow a very developer centric crowd so it might be a bit self-selecting. I am enjoying Mastodon way more than twitter and I get more engagement on average.

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!

Mastodon has a feature that allows you to migrate from one instance to another within Mastodon. Lemmy does not, and I think this is an important feature to have

Yoo, people who say "oh my, mastodon doesn't have likes and algo and that's what makes it perfect", are you nuts? Good suggestion algorithms are the only thing we need in our services be it music, video streaming or social networks. I just came to mastodon, how do you expect me to find people to follow? It would be so much easier to select from somewhat relevant posts than to google who to follow on mastodon because its search engine works like crap. Lemmy is getting good now because of communities migrating from reddit, but huge accounts from twitter don't sway so easily as mastodon is not so good as a twitter alternative

This post was at the top of Mastodon's explore page yesterday: https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843

I feel it perfectly encapsulates the issues I see others and I face with Mastodon. Since it was #1 trending, it probably resonated with many more too.

The technical issues can eventually solved. The cultural ones? That's the big question.

Lemmy seems far more approachable. It has its issues, but at least it has a working search.

> 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.

Hello, have you tried Akkoma or Firefish?

I've been on and off mastodon since 2019 and I've really wanted to like it, however the lack of a usable search kills it for me. I guess when your the main dev and you have half of mastodon following you a usable search isn't really necessary. Someone did try to work on a way to scrape and make mastodon searchable but they got hounded off mastodon I believe?

I tried to use hashtags but the ones I followed seemed to have a large number of terminally online/bots posting links making finding anything useful practically useless. In the end I got fed up of the feeling I was shouting into the void. I want to use and like Mastodon but I felt like I was fighting the system.

I'm just glad Lemmy seems to have taken off it's not perfect but it's certainly on the way

Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

The ‘Local’ and ‘Federated’ tabs are a live feed of post from your home instance and all the other instances, respectively. I feel these are pretty useless and definitely don’t warrant their own tabs. Having a local trending tab for seeing popular posts on your instance would be more interesting.

I might agree with you on federated, but the local timeline on smaller or tight knit instances tend to be really nice. I'm on this instance's Hajkey (slightly customized Firefish fork) and spend most of my time on the local timeline. It's only when you get to the size of .social, .online and whatnot that it loses it's usefulness. And that seems to be the direction website boy wants to take Mastodon given he took the local timeline out from the official Mastodon mobile app.

The search bar basically doesn’t work, is this just me???

Full text search is an admin setting that can be turned on and off I believe. It (the way Mastodon implements it at least) takes a lot of server resources which is why most instances don't bother.

This reads like it was written by someone who wants to be an influencer on Mastodon and is frustrated that its designed so that can't happen.

1. It actually does appear that Mastodon doesn't know how many replies there are until it loads them for display. Glitch, a Mastodon fork with some UI enhancements has an option to display an estimate of the number of replies. Lemmy obviously displays an exact comment count while using the same protocol. There may be a performance/efficiency motivation for this.
2. A trending feature should probably have the option to include federated content, as some instances are very small, even single-user.
3. I find the stance taken by Mastodon's developer and many users... I'll be charitable and say unreasonable. It's about a dozen lines of code to add a proper search and there are two ways to do it (Postgres text search is easy, Elasticsearch may be better for big servers). Some server admins have implemented this.
4. I'm seeing that for both follows and followers.

There are other ActivityPub Twitter-alikes that may meet your needs better, such as Akkoma. Akkoma has reasonable search, can show remote follows and followers, and seems to keep accurate reply counts. It's not as polished looking though.

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

I have barely ever used Twitter and yet I tried Mastodon, but it is uninteresting to me, maybe I just don't like microblogging social media, Reddit/Lemmy in other part is easier for me to get addicted lol.

Mastodon's search not applying to all posts is 'a feature, not a bug', as mentioned in the documentation:

Admins may optionally install full-text search. Mastodon’s full-text search allows logged-in users to find results from their own posts, their favourites, their bookmarks and their mentions. It deliberately does not allow searching for arbitrary strings in the entire database, in order to reduce the risk of abuse by people searching for controversial terms to find people to dogpile.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/#search

I do understand the rationale behind it in that it makes it safer for people to share personal or political things to their followers without the risk of abuse from strangers, and the recommended alternative is to hashtag any post that's okay to be publicly found.

The problem with this is that there is no agreement on which hashtags to use consistently, and that people are not used to, or feel a stigma about, adding hashtags to the end of each post.

I mean, you're not wrong. The "problems" of Mastodon are features. Avoiding an algorithm to suggest toots was done on purpose. It's why likes are simply for the author, not really for others. Boost promote toots by increasing exposure.

Likes are not the same as likes on Twitter, nor should they really matter. The intent of Mastodon is not to promote some toots over others due to popularity which many times just creates feedback loops. It's why you would see repetitive content on Reddit and if Lemmy gets remotely the same size, it'll suffer the same way. Algorithms are problematic in that they tend to get abused.