Like a lot of others, I've been looking at Reddit alternatives recently which is what landed me here at Lemmy.
How do you think Lemmy compares to Reddit? But also, for people who have tried other Reddit alternatives than Lemmy, how do they compare? What has been the pros and cons of each community for you?
The main pros: decentralized*, productive conversations, no karma, open source.
The main con is that "decentralized" is a good idea, but it only works if practiced. Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out. Minor cons include a lack of decent video embedding, missing some niche communities, and small bugs.
Overall I've rediscovered a lot of the internet that I had simply stopped checking because reddit took over my digital life. I read HackerNews again, the NYT, and a lot more. It's nice.
Most people have jumped onto lemmy.world instead of spreading out.
The main reason I chose lemmy.world is because I wanted to set up a community and my account on an instance that seemed less likely to disappear. I suspect that's the reason for many others as well, though it might end up being a false hope. Who knows...
I agree completely and I'm in the same boat. Hopefully "community migration" becomes possible where you can ship all your posts to a new instance if necessary.
I jumped onto BeeHaw when I first left Reddit, but found I couldn't connect to some communities. It turns out that BeeHaw defederated from some Lemmy instances (like Lemmy.world) because they have more open registration. So I left BeeHaw and came to Lemmy.world.
Does this mean that I might need to occasionally interact with someone who doesn't share similar views as me? Yes, but it also means I'm more free to join different communities that I wanted to join.
For me I started on lemmy.ml because that is where you get kinda herded to when you come initially. I don't know if it's still clunky, but when I was on there it was slow. Tried lemmy.world a couple days later and it was smooth as butter. My goal was the smoothest experience after the initial impression I got from lemmy.ml I was worried. But lemmy.world was way better. Been here for a month, lemmy.world went through a few server upgrades and the reddit hug of death on the first, but either they handled it pretty quick or I have become patient with it as I learned how the fediverse works.
Today is my first day on lemmy.world. I was on VLemmy but it vanished without a trace yesterday. So I picked the largest instance I could to avoid having to recreate my feed list a third time.