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.
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 developers forgot that their social media may end up generating discussions. They were too focused on ‘screaming into the void’ aspect of Twitter!