Jupiter Rowland

Mastodon is specialising in microblogging and, most importantly, interaction between single user accounts. It has absolutely no support for groups whatsoever.

Lemmy, in turn, is specialising in groups. And it has even less support for interaction between single users.

Mastodon users can theoretically subscribe to Lemmy communities. To them and to Mastodon, however, it’s like following a user. Lemmy requires a title for each new post which aren’t implemented in Mastodon (except for inbound Article-type objects).

Also, Mastodon has no support whatsoever for enclosed threaded conversations with exactly one post and otherwise comments. On Mastodon, everything is a post, and you have to jump through hoops to see an entire thread. If you want to reply to a post, and you want everyone in the thread to see your reply, you have to mention absolutely everyone who has participated in the thread so far.

Well, and then there are mentions which Mastodon automatically adds to replies, but which are unnecessary on Lemmy, as well as hashtags which are critically important for content discovery on Mastodon but entirely unsupported by Lemmy.

The other way around works even less because it’s absolutely impossible for Lemmy users to follow Mastodon accounts.

Part of this mess are development politics. The Lemmy devs aren’t even interested in properly federating with Mbin and PieFed, much less anything else that has groups and even less anything that doesn’t. Gargron’s goal has always been to make Mastodon appear to be the Fediverse proper, i.e. the Fediverse being a “decentralised walled garden” that only consists of Mastodon. And even if a Mastodon user was to stumble upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, it was to look broken and inferior in comparison with Mastodon.

One nice thing about XMPP is that it can theoretically use transports to connect to everything and then some.

I have seen a Matrix/ActivityPub bridge in action, though.

NOOOOOOOOOO WE MUST ALWAYS REPLACE $Product WITH “$Product BUT IT’S FEDERATED WITH MASTODON”!!!111

Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t have any way to connect to and interact with single users.

Mastodon, on the contrary, is all about single users following single users. It has no support for groups whatsoever. Mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, yes. They can reply to posts, but in a very Mastodon way (automatic mentions, they’ll probably insert hashtags etc.). Seeing (almost) the entire conversation is the default on Lemmy and extremely tedious and anything but straight-forward on Mastodon. And starting a new thread in a Lemmy community from Mastodon is difficult, nobody knows how to do it right, and whoever tries it will clash with Lemmy’s culture.

Stuff like Friendica or Hubzilla is somewhat more general-purpose. It can do both. But I’ve yet to see a Lemmy user subscribe to a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum (the opposite does work).

Pleroma.

Or, if you ask some Mastodon fundamentalists, everything that isn’t Mastodon or Pixelfed is inherently right-wing.

And he wants to market it as his own, original, scratch-made, “nothing even close to this has ever only even been attempted before” creation.

And because almost nobody outside the Fediverse has ever heard about anything in the Fediverse, he’ll succeed. To the point where people will laugh about Mastodon being a Haven Social rip-off because they’ve heard of Haven Social first and Mastodon later.

These odds are still extremely slim. Even if there was one Pillowfort user who has heard of Wafrn, that one voice wouldn’t be loud enough to reach the whole crowd in time before they all move to something that’s nothing like Tumblr or Pillowfort (e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky). And I don’t think that there are that many more people on Pillowfort who have heard of Wafrn. Especially considering how few people on Mastodon, much less Lemmy, have heard of it.

Is the Pillowfort community discussing a collective move to the Fediverse, to someplace in the Fediverse that is not Mastodon, to someplace in the Fediverse that has largely got the same features as Tumblr?

My personal experience, and I’ve got a lot of personal experience in this, is that free, open-source, decentralised alternatives are vastly less well-known than those think who know them inside-out.

Most of the time, when people are forced to escape a centralised silo, they tend to move to another centralised silo instead. For it’s the centralised silos that are well-known because it’s them that tend to have advertisement budgets, it’s them that know best how to manipulate Google by SEO means, and it’s them that mass media and/or tech media prefer to talk and write about because they’re easier to understand.

The majority of Mastodon users don’t know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. For them, the Fediverse is Mastodon. If they had any reason to move away from Mastodon, they’d be stuck between joining Bluesky, going back to X or staying on Mastodon because they don’t have the foggiest idea of what else the Fediverse itself has to offer that might suit them better.

Outside of the Fediverse, knowledge about the Fediverse is dominated by

• not even having heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon, but not of the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon and thinking Mastodon is the Fediverse

Another example: Flashback to the early 2010s. People wanted to leave Facebook for greener pastures that didn’t snoop on them as egregiously. At first they went nowhere because “there was nowhere to go”. Then, when Google+ was launched, they went to Google+. Sure, it was a Google product that definitely would snoop on them. But hey, at least it wasn’t Facebook, and Google would probably snoop less than Facebook! Besides, “there was nowhere else to go”.

All regardless of diaspora* existing. All regardless of diaspora* shaking up mass media in summer 2010 when the four devs announced a free, non-commercial “Facebook killer” and asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding to develop it, and they got over $200,000. (This is also why the only people who know that Google+ was an all-out diaspora* rip-off are current or former diaspora* users.) All regardless of Friendica existing.

Considering all this, chances that the Pillowfort community has heard of Wafrn are next to nil.

Not likely enough, though.

I’ve watched Mastodon and its users for years now. From my experience, for more than 50% of all Mastodon users, the Fediverse equals Mastodon. That doesn’t mean that they don’t count Lemmy as part of the Fediverse. It rather means that they’ve literally never even heard about Lemmy. They haven’t heard of any Fediverse software other than Mastodon.

There are lots of ATmosphere users who haven’t even heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse.

Another example: I’m an active user of a virtual world system named OpenSimulator. It’s extremely similar to Second Life, also because it uses the same viewers. It’s free-as-in-license as well as free-as-in-free-beer and free-as-in-most-grids-don’t-even-have-in-world-payment. It’s open-source. It’s decentralised to the point where your avatar can teleport to other grids (= worlds = server instances). And yet, the vast majority of OpenSim users have never heard of Mastodon either, much less the Fediverse.

I bet that next to nobody on Pillowfort has ever heard of the Fediverse, and that absolutely nobody has ever heard of anything else in the Fediverse than Mastodon.

Mastodon. Hands down.

Mastodon has more monthly active users than the entire rest of the Fediverse combined. There are lots of people for whom the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Most of the time, when someone hears about the Fediverse for the first time, it’s explained to them as only Mastodon, allegedly because that’s easier to understand. And there are vastly more people who have heard of Mastodon, but not the Fediverse, than who have heard of any other Fediverse software, but not the Fediverse.

There are tons of phone apps made for Mastodon and only Mastodon. There are websites that have “Fedi” in their name, but that are built hard against only Mastodon, and if they’re compatible with anything else, it’s by chance. diaspora* (remember 2010 when those four kids announced a free, open-source, decentralised “Facebook killer”, asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding and got over $200,000) refuses to join the Fediverse because, according to one dev, Fediverse developers don’t “implement ActivityPub”, they “implement Mastodon”.

Lots of people say that claiming that Mastodon is the Fediverse is justified.

Here are the numbers from the FediIndex:

• Most active instances: Mastodon (36.98%; Lemmy is 9th with 1.11%)
• Most accounts: Mastodon (51.16%; Lemmy is 7th with 1.77%)
• Most monthly active accounts (not counting Misskey and GoToSocial whose stats are off): Mastodon (51.17%; Lemmy is 5th with 2.37%)
• Most posts: Mastodon (60.48%; Lemmy is 10th with 0.54%)