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  • The behavior doesn't feel much different, but the smaller community makes it more common for people to engage with you, and that makes it feel more like a community.

  • It's been less "mechanistic" so far: fewer canned replies, fewer "oh this post again". It's partly because of there being very few bots and less astroturfing, but also I think it's just the mindset, people here may be less likely to be passive consumers. On reddit I kept having the issue of people misreading everything I posted, because they barely cared about what they had on their screen and wanted everything on it to cater to their taste. Big social networks encourage a form of algorithmic solipsism.

  • People are more genuinely interested in actually contributing to a conversation here and likely to read through your stuff/reply. I feel more seen.

    Reddit is a generic corporate algoritm flavored slop with LLMs with an agenda talking to human morons somehow dumber and less aware than the LLMs. Lemmy is at least mostly human but has a personality archetype bias that takes getting used to. Even on niche communities here theres a high likelyhood you're talking to someone whos either a left leaning political activist, is really into alternative gender identity politics, knows a lot about information technology/STEM, has some serious kinky fetishes, is neurodivergent, or a mix of the above.

    So you have the conversational pitfalls that come from talking to tech nerds, liberal arts students, the loud and proud members of lgbqt+, tankies, and all the in between relatively outcast groups that didn't fit well on reddit in the first place. Every 1/10 post on all is going to be about how fucked the climate change is, lgbqt rights, femboys, trump/elon/conservative republicans doing something stupid or evil or facist, a really unfunny 'meme' thats really about spreading some message or showcasing how victimized X minority group is, why linux is good and windows/microsoft bad, some half baked plan by young political activist who think they can overthrow a global corporatocracy with some clever cordinated consumer protesting. At least the content is overall consistent.

    As someone who doesn't really identify with most of these im left feeling lemmy isn't for me sometimes but its a decent enough social outlet that I can tune out the stuff I don't care for while being involved with the niche communities im actually here to be part of.

  • You might need to be more specific, since there is a new wave of former redditors joining.

    As a former redditor, who joined ~2 years ago, it was very friendly and wholesome when I joined, but has been getting more toxic in recent times.

  • Not quite as many leading experts in their field.

    The braintrust is starting to build, we can now have a whatisthisthing community, but you still don't get to say "exoornithological engineers of Lemmy, in your opinion..."

    If you're used to the weird wackos being the gay hating bible thumping gun fucking Republicans, they're basically not present here. They're replaced with the "Mao did nothing wrong" crowd.

    There is less bandwagon posting here. "this" chains and so forth.

    Cross-posting or doing !example@whatever.lol doesn't happen as often as it did on Reddit.

    Oh here's a big cultural difference: Lemmy mods tend not to be as anal about their community formats as Reddit mods are. I got a 14 day ban from r/whatisthisthing for telling an anecdote related to the thing in question, because it wasn't STRICTLY about identifying what the thing was. "Which community is this, what are the norms, what is the expected format etc" is not as much of a concern here. Lemmy communities aren't art projects.

    No one here is important or official. There are no video game community managers or anything like that here. Lemmy is not used for interacting with anyone other than fellow idle nerds.

    • No one here is important or official. There are no video game community managers or anything like that here. Lemmy is not used for interacting with anyone other than fellow idle nerds.

      This is how Reddit was before it exploded in popularity and companies and celebrities started taking it seriously. I don't know if Lemmy will ever get to that point, especially seeing how much abuse people will endure before they change platforms.

      • Other important point: we already have homeservers that federate with shitholes like threads or hybrids like bluesky. Lemmy is just one way of displaying AP protocol content. From that perspective it is basically ungovernable, which is cool if you ask me. ;)

      • Eh, on Lemmy, users can really easily switch to a home instance that isn't doing that, so it's a little more self-correcting.

  • 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.

  • A greater percentage of more mature users, many of whom don’t want to see Lemmy turn into the cesspool that reddit has become

  • I don't remember the conversations I would ever have on r*ddit. Probably because I basically never got any form of interaction other than up and down votes on things that weren't niche communities like for Pokemon Reborn/Rejuvenation. I assume it's because I only ever started using that old account around end of summer 2020.

  • Lemmy is a lot "bubblier" than Reddit, I suspect because the communities are smaller. It's a lot easier for a community to have a preferred view on things, even things you wouldn't suspect were part of the community's theme, and if you take the wrong position you'll get pummeled with downvotes more easily.

    Not that it doesn't happen on Reddit too, but I see it far more here on Lemmy. I'm still active on both and while I haven't done any formal comparison you're asking how it "feels" and that's definitely how it feels. I speak my mind freely on both platforms but on this one I'm more likely to see a pile of downvotes.

  • Disclaimer: I always viewed limited subreddits that fed my interests, and my Home feed. I never looked at All, because it never seemed to have things I'm interested in. That probably influences how I perceived Reddit.

    Reddit:

    • Way more niche topics. It was quite possible to find people who shared the same narrow interests as you. On Lemmy, having conversations about these things is hard.
    • Towards the end, there was a much greater tendency for top comments to be a joke/quip/insider joke as opposed to actual thoughtful discussion.
    • It felt like there was a much greater tolerance of nuance and complexity, though this was also showing cracks towards the end.

    Lemmy:

    • Politics definitely swing a bit more towards the left. In some cases this means "people just talk about corporations doing bad stuff more", and in some cases it can mean some pretty out-there positions, like people fanboying for China or terrorists.
    • It's much, much harder for me to find activity on topics I'm interested in. If you're outside of Lemmy's handful of interests, not just finding but even building topical discussion feels like a struggle.
    • Not everyone, but I do feel like I come across more people here who feel... allergic to nuance. Frankly, I think this might be less of a Reddit-vs-Lemmy thing and more of how just social media in general is shifting these days.

    • It’s much, much harder for me to find activity on topics I’m interested in. If you’re outside of Lemmy’s handful of interests, not just finding but even building topical discussion feels like a struggle.

      You can have a look at !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

    • The allergy to nuance thing, I get a lot of people who take me HYPER literally. Casual conversations become formal peer reviewed debates because at least ten Lemmyers were potty trained at gunpoint.

  • I'll take a qed here...dogpiling on lemmy is an addiction, and there's a fair degree of 'stalking'.
    Both are tiring.

    If a post or comment gets to '-1', there is virtually no recovery. Stalking simplifies this endeavour.

129 comments