As far as I can tell from my venture into Mastodon’s feeds, the demographics of that part of Fediverse isn’t that different from what Lemmy has: the same political takes, FOSS stuff, “big corpos bad”, etc.
I wonder, is there anything that Mastodon excels at that Lemmy just doesn’t provide? For example, I noticed that there are game developers and artists posting their stuff on Mastodon. Not many game developers (or any creatives, really) on Lemmy though.
I think it’s still under the tipping point. The more fans use it, the more it’ll be good for fandoms, but it sometimes takes more fans onboarding and the thing they’re a fan of also at least nominally present for it to match the numbers of other platforms.
But in terms of functionality for fandoms, it’s as good as twitter was. It doesn’t have the same purpose as tumblr or Facebook, so those can’t be directly compared. I would say that in terms of what a fan base could use Mastodon for, it matches or exceeds Facebook simply by virtue of not being corporate, which means no artificial barricades. Tumblr is its own thing though, and it isn’t going to be 1:1 with lemmy/piefed or Mastodon. The use case just isn’t close enough.
There are fandoms present on Mastodon, mostly anime based, and the hashtag system works well for that, imo.
Fediverse has a Tumblr alternative nowadays - wafrn. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the culture there is much more different from both Mastodon and Lemmy. More chaotic and creative, it’s really nice to see!
I’m surprised. My (limited) experience with .social’s feed is that it’s mostly Very Serious People who are posting, mostly about politics. Maybe I need to dig deeper.