Mastodon is personality focused rather than topic focused like Lemmy/piefed/et al.

If there is a person or organization that you’re interested in following (or if you’re a person or organization that is or aspires to be followed) then mastodon is the service for you.

they are entirely different contexts of communication. mastodon is a ‘microblog’ platform, where one person tends to broadcast to a group of subscribed users

lemmy is just forums with threaded discussion… many to many as it were.

personally, ive always generally hated the twittersphere (microblogging), and avoid it mostly. but it is nice being able to subscribe to the small number of microbloggers i do enjoy thanks to mbin’s built-in integration.

It can interact with peertube, pixelfed, miskey, and many more things. Lemmy only really sees the threadiverse part of the fediverse.

But he interface of mastodon isn’t threaded, so it’s unusable to me. I was point to Sharkey and akkoma, which I might try instead, but I feel quite comfortable here, honestly.

For the commuities/topics I’m interested in Mastodon has a very weird vibe that clashes with the vibe of the communities on Lemmy and sometimes it feels like the Lemmy communities are getting brigaded by Mastodon users. Also Mastodon comments are very “noisy”, every comment needs an @someone to work and every second word is a hashtag. If I check out Mastodon on its own it just seems like a lot of people screaming into the void, but I never understood the appeal of Twitter either.

Mastodon excels in updates. If a niche is alive on Mastodon, then you will get news from it before Lemmy. Especially in infosec, or (if you are from Europe, especially from Germany or the Netherlands) local news.
In a way, shitposting is also freer on microblogging, without Threadiverse’s pigeonholing into different magazines/communities

The discussion may have worse UX. Only selected alternative frontends (like phanpy.social) have got nested threads like here and until recently, replies were delivered only to replier’s follower instances, resulting with users not seeing all the discussion and inconsistent threads between instances.

Mastodon is better for following individuals, Lemmy for communities.

I personally don’t like microblogging platforms in general. It’s cool that there’s an alternative to twitter and the like, but I just have no pull towards platforms that emulate that kind of environment.
I think it’s great that it’s so popular and has introduced a lot of people to the fediverse and spread awareness of ethical alternatives to corporate slop, but is not for me.

If you use Mbin, or I believe Piefed now too, instead of Lemmy, you can interact with Mastodon freely without having to get a separate account there. I’m subscribed to a lot of Mastodon accounts as a threadiverse user, and I only have this one account.

i would like to be able to follow lemmy communities and lemmy users from my mastodon account.

A recent Piefed update allows to follow Mastodon accounts: https://piefed.zip/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/1736809/piefed-v1-7-11-is-released-finding-and-adding-people-to-follow-posts-from-rss-feeds-and-mo

Mastodon is her better at things like updates in the way you mentioned, and it’s easier to build a purpose focused # than it is to build a community on lemmy.

You’ve also got different character limits, so you end up with most posts and responses being easier to follow; just hit the # in question, and you’ll end up with concise responses. Which isn’t better than a longer character limit, as it often lacks depth and nuance. It’s different and has benefits though.

It’s also way easier to find relevant imagery on because of the hashtag system. There’s no good way to look up images on lemmy/piefed at all, but Mastodon makes it easy, as long as the poster uses #s accurately. Since most do, if you’re into something like birding, you can find specific birds by a # search. That’s the best example, but it applies to damn near any subject matter.

I’d also argue that it’s a better system for artists and writers overall, as long as they have their own places where they keep their works. You can’t drop short stories on most Mastodon instances, and big image files of art tend to not be ideal. But being able to put your stuff in a single repository of some sort and just link it via a toot for anyone that’s a fan is superb.

There is always MBin, on an MBin client you can see and post on Lemmy and Mastodon.

I will say that boosts can make posts spread on Mastodon a bit more quickly than I’ve seen Lemmy posts spread on Lemmy. But Lemmy posts aren’t particularly Mastodon-friendly, I do wish they were formatted to be a bit more readable.

If you’re interested in specific people or organisations I guess you’re much more likely to find them on Mastodon.

Mastodon has a lot of people talking about craft. Meanwhile Lemmy’s rare communities on the topics get a post every ten days.