It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?

I think the answer is fairly clear. Lemmy’s topics & votes system funnels condenses the user-base to focus on particular things at particular times. The total number of users may be smaller than Mastodon, but basically everyone on lemmy is looking at the top posts on the front page first, and then exploring to other stuff later; whereas on Mastodon everyone is just doing their own thing.

Focusing people on one topic means that there will be discussion at that topic at that time; and discussion leads to people checking back to read and reply to responses…

I routinely use both Mastodon and Lemmy. I see a lot more varied content on Mastodon, but it is more fleeting. i.e. very little discussion, and fairly short window of interaction with posts. Lemmy has a lot less ‘stuff’, but a lot more conversation.

I think the difference is interesting, but it definitely isn’t something we should use to say which platform is doing better or anything like that.

It stands to question that with a fraction of the users on Lemmy, why is the interaction/engagement considerably higher?

mastodon is another “general interest” social media hub along the same vein of reddit or bluesky or .world or .ee, which means that (excluding its founding group) it takes many forms of long term investments to gain sufficient traction enough to establish a core group of active users (assuming that it ever succeeds at doing so at all) and that core group is a small fraction of its user base (presuming that a reddit post i saw years ago showing that a tiny fraction of users on social media are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of content on all platforms is true).

lemmy’s political origins pre-included the identities and accompanying pre-built core groups that had already start coalescing in other social media platforms like reddit & tiktok. by the time of the reddit blackout protests those groups already had new online safe spaces in various lemmy instances and their ranks swelled at the same time other reddit users started to fill the ranks of other “general interest” instances like .world and later .ee

that link you posted on lemmy user counts reflects the “general interest” instance’s difficulties of retaining a core group of active users that disproportionately create the most content. it’s around this content is where you will find the interaction/engagement that characterizes lemmy’s considerably higher engagement; instead of the news & link sharing lower interaction/engagement that characterizes the “general interest” instances.

right now; the “general interest” instances have a relatively handful of VERY prolific users expending a clearly excessive amount of time and effort at creating a sea of inactive communities & instances in the hopes that it might eventually serve as a basis for a “general interest” core group and i hope that they succeed; i think that the lemmyverse would be better with politically moderate points of view and i’m sure that the “general interest” instances won’t lose all of their users to bluesky, threads, nostr, etc. by then.

An average post on Mastodon/X/Bluesky/Threads is “this is what I encounter” or “this is what I believe”. Those kinds of posts don’t specifically ask for a response. You can respond to it, but it doesn’t require one.

That’s not how you communicate on Lemmy or Reddit.

That’s the difference.

Each platform has its own usages.

So to compare and say “well platform Y is more social, because there’s more interaction than on platform 2” is a bit weird.

You wouldn’t compare a letter with a message board on a town plaza either. Both can be used to communicate, but they’re not comparable to each other.

Or in another way:
On Mastodon or Nostr, when you post something only a small subsection of the userbase actually sees it (only those who follow you, those that follow any of the hashtags that you used, or those that check the full firehose).
On Lemmy the entire community you posted it to can see your post.
Obviously you can get more response on Lemmy! More people get to see it.

Twitter have big interaction because user count is extremely high. For a microblogging platform maybe it requires that it needs lots of users and some “creators” who are followed by thousands of people, unlike communities which anyone can post and everyone joined the community can see.

I also think upvotes and downvotes plays a role too since mastodon does not have them(only boosts but boost actually shares with your own followers which might be very low)

not sure what poetry does

as long as the ladies seem happy might be something to it

[…] call you an idiot for doing things a different way […]

Reddit-brain is all over Lemmy. This is a far cry from the technical focused communities you’ll find on Github or StackExchange.

Have you used StackExchange? It’s very much “call you an idiot for doing things in a different way.”

I think it helps that Lemmy is so small, we know we’re going to encounter each other again.

Sorry, what?

You don’t. I head back to Reddit personals for that.

There is no block feature? What the hell.

Huh. My experience with Nostr is essentially similar with fediverse. As it was decentralized, everything is depends on each instance and which kind of people you follow.

Not everyone on Nostr are everything you just said. Some people are literally using it the same way as Mastodon. Just making friend and talking about random hobbies.

Never heard of Mostr either icl

The thing about Mastodon is that you have to really heavily curate.

On Forum Blogs, like here, if you go to All, you will see articles, questions, images, and communities.

On Micro Blogs, like Mastodon, if you go to all you will see articles, but the rest will mostly be international thoughts of the day, some of which may be questions, non-sequitors, and images.

Not so much the communities, by default.

That doesn’t mean that Mastodon/the like can’t, you just have to curate it a bit more. I followed #Bloomscrolling and it brings tons of nature in my feed, it’s lovely. But if you follow like, @GamingFeed it’s just reposted content that looks for keywords – my Helldivers 2 posts were being promoted but also random articles and posts from others. Somewhat useful for finding articles, but hollow because it’s just a bot I’m certain.

I also find that while there are communities on mastodon, they’re pretty niche so you end up limited to roughly the same things here, tech either hardware or software, gaming or relatives like figures, nature, or politics (though I’ve found Mastodon is fairly less political on a default account. Wasn’t using it much though so I may have missed it entirely).

Meanwhile on Lemmy and the like, you pretty much just get shown communities. We all know ich_el or whatever that German meme one is, we all have passed by 196, that sort of thing doesn’t appear on Mastodon so much.

That said, I do see mastodon accounts commenting on posts on Lemmy, so it’s also possible to mix them. I will say, generally the mastodon comments do not go into as much thoughtful detail in response on these articles, but that could very well be an instance limitation (some have 40k characters, some have 500-2000).

So there are some fairly large differences and while they can technically accomplish the same thing, there can a bit of a cultural difference between the two formats. And as you probably know, default instances also can change this experience on both – Solarpunk.moe is awesome and well moderated and is focused on solarpunk, mastodon.social is pretty large and chaotic. Lemmy is the same way, of course, slrpnk.net is fairly small compared to the major instances and the home feed reflects that

Longer posts. More control over formating. Easier to post more types of media.

And maybe it’s less of a “social” media, and more of a “personal” project.

Maybe it’s 90s nostalgia talking, but I miss those cool personal webpages.