I had been spending quite some time on mastodon, but lately realized that it just isn’t for me.
Mastodon is very focused on individuals, not as much on content. I’m not saying there isn’t a need for mastodon, and I’m happy it’s there, but my main use case is contacting (semi) public figures or software-support there, which happens rarely. Curating a feed that is both interesting to me and “high quality” without being overrun doesn’t seem feasible.
Lemmy is much more focused on content. You don’t follow people, you follow topics or interests and get the things surfaced that the most people in that interest group appreciate. The discussions work much better (Twitter-like reply’s are just one huge bag of trash). It also doesn’t matter who the people are behind the content, as long as it’s interesting it will find an audience.
Just something that I’ve been thinking about. Any thoughts on this?
I’m trying to use it like Twitter where I find people and organizations to follow who are funny or interesting…but the majority of people “boost” other stuff more than they post. This gets problematic for me because you just follow a few accounts and suddenly your feed is so full you can’t read through it all. I want it to be manageable… I want to follow people I enjoy reading…but I don’t necessarily want to see 30 posts a day that they like. Maybe I’m using it wrong or thinking about it wrong. I enjoy some things about it and I’m happy it exists, but I’m having trouble finding a lot posts and users that I find super engaging.
I follow probably 30 Lemmy communities and scrolling through the feed brings me much more that is interesting, beautiful, funny, insightful…
There are clients that let you disable boosts for certain people, ivory on iOS is one of them. But I totally get the general issue you’re having, I have the same one.