Better is a matter of opinion.

The main difference is in features. Firefisg has more things you can use to arrange what you see. It has longer text limits (usually). It has a more developed web UI.

Mastodon has better apps in Megalodon and moshidon (opinion) compared to the best calckey/firefish app I’ve found, milktea. Firefish used to be called calckey, but changed its name.

In my opinion, if you want a simpler, hashtag driven microblogging service, mastodon is king. It does what it does very simply, and that can be a very good thing. It’s what I prefer for most things.

If you want a more customizable service with a longer form writing capability (but still shorter than lemmy/kbin lengths, firefish is awesome.

I tend to use mastodon on my author account and firefish for poo and giggles. The established # based activity is usually easier to interact with on mastodon because of the lower character limit. Things stay concise and smooth until someone from other federated services takes part.

With mastodon being the better known service, you’ll also get nore active “local” feeds. This is rarely something I use since I’m not looking for that type of interaction at all. As an author, I look for ways to get my stuff out there without shilling, and the network of writers and readers in the various # groupings is very good at that. Yeah, you can interact with those from firefish but you fuck up the flow.

Firefish has some cool features, but every time I opened it on my laptop the fans would immediately spin up to 100%. It’s not exactly lightweight on the client side.

To me, the main difference is that I can’t get Firefish to work.

Firefish is much more customisable, both for users and from an Admin point of view. For example, I like that as an Admin I can upload a bunch of emojis that have particular meaning to the instance theme. I can also create a site wide theme (but users can change that if they want to). I can follow people and interact with people on any microblogging service that runs activitypub (so Mastodon etc). I found installing Firefish very easy, using their ubuntu installer .sh file.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Mastodon, its great software. I just find firefish more versatile.

Commented here to learn more.

I don’t use microblogging much but:

• Custom emoji

• Stickers

• Games

• Custom themes

• Cat mode…

edit:
There is table of compare all fediverse software https://joinfirefish.org/

@Meowmoth I would say feature bloat. If you need social network message service and want fast loads and less mobile traffic/device resources usage then Mastodon is a king with very tried and true nature. Firefish is fork of Misskey so I can tell a bit as Misskey user. If you want everything in one social service then Misskey/Firefish is the one. Build-in rss reader, memos, gallery, pages, channel for chat like experience, plugins, minigames, likes=emoji that convey message, so… Feature bloat.