There is a bit of nuance in how these two are different and I'd say Mastodon feels more like early Twitter or early Facebook. On the consume side, that means your home feed has no algorithm.
Practically, it means you only see what you want and you only see it linearly. You never wonder "why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?" (e.g. Elon constantly in my feed for some reason) Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles. The home feed is linear like the early days of FB.
Early FB was great; I used it as a news feed as I only "liked" sources I wanted news from. Today? The feed is algorithmically assembled and full of content that is indistinguishable from ads (because of course, both FB and X make their money from ads and algorithmically enhanced engagement). Am I seeing this because someone paid to boost the views? How do I get this feed to behave? (Hypothetical question; maybe it's possible with a lot of tuning and config -- Mastodon just does exactly what I want/expect out of the box: follow these tags + follow these people = see this content in a linear flow)
To me, this simplicity makes it much more approachable on the consume side.
On the publish side, it lets you see the activity level of tags in the past week. This makes it easier to decide "how should I tag this content?".
One other aspect that I think the HN crowd can appreciate is that you don't have to figure out the platform settings for privacy and opt out of ads, tracking, and so on. Yes, there are still some privacy settings to toggle, but Mastodon isn't an ad platform and doesn't make money from being able to track you across the web and feeding you ads.
More intuitive on both the pub and sub sides, IMO. If you liked early FB and early Twitter, you'll instantly find Mastodon more pleasant and intuitive to use.
If I recall from the algo weighting dump they did last year, Elon is hard-coded to be basically the absolute most important thing to the sorting algo with a pretty long decay time. When he posts, it's effectively guaranteed to be in all Twitter users' feeds, and that's how he wants it.
Then again, I don't know first-hand; I quit Twitter many months before it got this version of Billionaire Buffoonery as an owner.
The other comments explain this better than I could.
In short:
I can post the same message on Twitter and Mastodon and get a thoughtful comment on the latter vs. no engagement/shitpost on the former.
Twitter feels like a bunch of angry people screaming into the void, whereas Mastodon is like screaming in a small cave filled with friendly weirdos. I like that. Eventually you lower your voice and start chatting.
I never figured out how to find something interesting on Twitter. The algo feed doesn't surface anything interesting anyway. On Mastodon, since I picked an instance that fits my interests I can actually browse the local instance feed/trending and see things that do interest me.
I'm pretty sold on Mastodon now, but I am wondering what it's failure mode looks like. Everything eventually gets worse - how might this happen with Mastodon?
