Former redditors, how do you feel the conversations on lemmy differ than the ones you've observed on reddit?

Depends massively on what subreddit on Reddit, and to a lesser degree, what community on the Threadiverse. /r/AskHistorians, /r/seventhworldproblems, /r/Europe, and /r/NFL don't have a whole lot in common.

I think that in terms of content, the Threadiverse today is much closer to very early Reddit than to Reddit over the past ten years or so. Reddit used to have a much heavier tech focus, lot of Linux too, though it tended to be more Lisp, academia, and startups. A lot of the people who came over early on the Threadiverse are far-left; the proportions definitely differ a lot there. I'm pretty sure that there's a higher furry and trans content ratio, but that's harder to judge; it may also just be people using avatars and home instances providing a hint.

A significant chunk of people on here seem extremely depressed. That was definitely not my take on especially early Reddit, which was fairly upbeat (though I do remember one Italian guy on /r/Europe who kept talking about how terrible Italy is today and how much better the 1980s were).

I think that there are more people who are kinda...I'm not sure how to put this politely. A little unglued from reality. I mean, I remember back during Bush's time in office, there being a lot of 9/11 conspiracy stuff on Reddit, but I feel like the proportion of people whose general take on everything feels extremely paranoid is a lot higher.

It definitely feels more international, less US-oriented, to me, and I frequented /r/Europe.

I feel like there are more older people. I have seen some website analytics of Reddit, and as I recall, it averaged something like early twenties. That may have changed over time, but I'd still bet that the median age here is higher.

Most of the subreddits that I used had far more users than even the most-active communities on the Threadiverse. This meant that there was a lot more content. On the other hand, it also meant that it was increasingly-common to spend a lot of time writing something, only for it to be buried under a flood of other content; if one didn't get a comment in pretty early in a post, users just skimming top comments might never see it. That was even more-true for posts -- one's chance of a post attracting attention in a community where a new post arrives every few minutes and many people just view top posts was not good, whereas here, I'm pretty sure that almost everyone on a community sees it. I think that Reddit had a better variety and amount of content to consume, whereas I feel that it's more-rewarding to contribute content here.

For the same smaller-size reason, it's a lot more common here for me to recognize usernames. Especially late Reddit, the chance of recognizing anyone off a subreddit, other than a few extremely-prolific posters, was not high. I'm talking to pseudonyms, sure, but it's "Kolanki, that furry dude that I remember", or "Flying Squid, that guy who mods a bunch of communities", not another user name that I'll probably never see or remember. I think that that affects the environment somewhat, that people act differently in a crowd of people that they "know" than in a crowd of strangers.

The Threadiverse in 2025 isn't a full replacement for me in the sense that Reddit has a subreddit with some level of non-zero activity on virtually any topic remotely of interest that I can think of. There are a few subreddits that I used to read regularly, like /r/cataclysmdda, for the video game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. !catadda@sh.itjust.works has very little activity, and for most video games, software packages, products, etc there isn't a community. Some subreddits dealt with content creation or all sorts of things, and the userbase just isn't here now to support that. So what I talk about differs somewhat.

I feel like users on the Threadiverse are less aggressive. Maybe it's moderation or the userbase or who-knows-what, but I remember a considerably higher proportion of flamewars on Reddit. I felt that there was a much-higher tendency for people to want to get the last word in on Reddit.

I have seen far less trolling than I did on Reddit (or Slashdot).

It's hard for me to judge the impact of LLM-generated bot comments on Reddit. I didn't personally notice many, at least on the (mostly-not-largest-in-size, so maybe not heavily-targeted) subreddits that I followed, but I've seen plenty of people on both Reddit and on the Threadiverse complaining about LLM-generated comments on Reddit, so unless they were outright wrong, either I couldn't pick up on some or they were targeting larger subreddits. It wasn't to the point that my conversations felt degraded, at least not at the time that I left.

The Threadiverse is smaller, and I think that I've seen content on one community inspire related-topic conversations on another. I don't think I recall that on Reddit.