Difference between adb shell [command] and interactive adb shell

I am wondering if the interactive shell adb shell runs in a different context then when invoking a command via adb shell [command]? The background to this question is, that I am running dinit on an Android powered board. dinit is started in user mode just for service management. When I run dinitctl -u list from the interactive shell I get the expected output (enabled services and their current state), but when I run it via adb shell dinitctl -u list I just get an error about the socket not being found (as if dinit itself was not running).