To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.
At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.
Most of the Lemmy post's / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.
It reminds me of that good old saying "you are not immune to propaganda", well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.
P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn't pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It's amazing.
We need polished mobile apps to really push the fediverse to the masses. It has been a great experience so far though and I think I'll stay a while.
Jerboa works for me, at least, better than the reddit official one ever did...
Same here. Although I have to admit it's not ready for the mainstream. I can imagine people struggling, for example, about what instance to input if they just charged in without taking note of the specific instance they joined.
I mean, for us it's simple. For others, maybe not.
It needs their tweaks though, adding new communities from other instances is impossible, or at least that's what it seems.
The apps situation has gotten a lot better over the years, but I can't understate how big of a sea change it was when Mastodon first came along. Prior to them, most fediverse apps were terrible. The influx of clients that came out of that community changed the network in so many ways.
What we need are more backend and full stack developers to shore up the core functionality. A polished mobile app is not going to cancel out the other shortcomings.
There are critical bugs and missing functions/features that need to be addressed first. Otherwise the masses are going to take one look and never return.
I've got a handful of friends where our only group chain is through a Matrix-Synapse server I have running in my closet. Everyone installed Element, and it works exactly like any other messaging program.
The only downside is that at the moment, it routinely and randomly struggles to decrypt certain messages.