As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I’m accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don’t use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon’s interface is not. I don’t care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
“Just the interface” is a big deal.
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I’m accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don’t use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon’s interface is not. I don’t care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
Good point! I can see where you’re coming from, thanks for your perspective.
Try out Fedilab if you’re on Android. I’m not by any means a big user of Mastadon, but it really improved my experience over the official app.
I still don’t really “get it” in regards to microblogging platforms, but I do occasionally find interesting things.