Now that you have settled here on Lemmy. What is your impression of it?

Less content to go through, so you end up going through posts and comments a bit more thoroughly. This translates to higher engagement from users overall compared to Reddit.

The con of course is less content to go through.

I think matured reddit is literally correct. People here at least seem older.

However people here definitely are also of a certain group. Which is not too surprising - it's a certain demographic taken from Reddit, not a random subsample. This is not really a good thing.

People here also seem more extreme in their political opinions (as in, not very "usual" or "casual" political views). This makes discussions a bit one-sided and polarized... But then again political discussions on reddit have always been so nice and proper and productive in comparison right /s

However I also see a lot of reasonable people and a lot of hope. I see more politeness (mostly outside of any political stuff).

I also like that people have choices - choice of instance and choice of client for example.

There's some good and bad but for me it's basically reddit with a bit less activity and slightly different experience but not significantly so. I'm confident that more people will come over time and that will solve most issues. And the benefits will still be there by then.

Friendlier than reddit, but a lot more really stupid hot takes than reddit. Not as many shitheads; but the shit heads that are here are even shittier than anywhere else I've been on the Internet. Mostly the super paranoid security and super hardcore "free speech" folks that are like the main character of Conspiracy Theory. This platform seems to attract a lot of those.

As an open platform that's similar to reddit, I'm in favor of it.

The reality though is not that great. And a lot of it comes down to at least some of the people who are here.

There doesn't really seem to be enough content to allow for browsing a curated list of communities yet, so I mainly browse by all. And what I have seen are a handful of seemingly extreme viewpoints with little to no room for nuance and discussion and an attitude from those people that they are absolutely correct in their beliefs and ideas. I'm talking tankies, hatred for Israel, hatred for cars, hatred for landlords/renting, and evangelism for Linux.

I know that having extreme attitudes is certainly not unique to lemmy as it exists all over the Internet and elsewhere. But it does seem to be fairly concentrated here. And again, without enough engagement in the smaller or more niche communities there isn't really enough content on its own.

So instead of actively browsing communities I want which would likely end up with very little content, I have started blocking instances and communities instead so I can still get a mix, but filter out things that I don't like. And that doesn't make for a great experience.

I have also seen some really stupid/ridiculous admin/mod drama that people also seemed to think wouldnt carry over from reddit, but of course it has.

All that to say, I still enjoy it enough to continue to browse. But I don't really participate often. And it has to a degree eliminated at least some of the bullshit from reddit.

If Reddit was a water park, Lemmy is the small adult jacuzzi room in the back.

Personally, I find the people here very elitist and unwelcoming, and I have found myself spending less and less time here because of it.

Apparently i should install Linux.

As someone who spent around half my life in IT and half in humanities, there's a lot less humanities content here than in Reddit or old Twitter. You might not notice it because you might have gravitated towards the IT side of those sites but it's noticeable here

More depressing news and Linux enthusiasts.

Feels like an echo chamber filled with angry political activists that seem more interested in hating and breaking things rather than discussing solutions. Can't say I like it here but for some reason I keep coming back. I probably block on average 3 to 7 people a day but doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Makes me further lose my hope in humanity if I'm completely honest.

Compared to Reddit

• too small. Most communities I’m interested in have too little activity
• more wholesome. More than once I’ve been shocked at answers that were nice instead of snarky
• too many UI bugs and unstable, yet somehow much less buggy and more stable than Reddit ever was
• if you don’t feed the trolls, they go away quickly

I feel like half of the people on here are 45yo Linux sysadmins, and the other half are Germans

I was enjoying it, but two things are getting tiring: the lack of social sciences and humanities, and especially the misogynistic 'tone' of some users.

For the first few months on the platform, I noticed these trends that I would end up agreeing with later on:

• Liking, or straight up adoring Linux

• Disliking, or straight up despising cars

• Everyone is left-wing and liberal

• Israel stinks

• Rainbows galore

• Big companies are cringe

• Independent media is based

• Products made by big companies are known to be spyware

• The Chromium "open-source" browser, as well as the engine that it uses, is basically the reason why Firefox is dying out

• Right-wing politicians are bad

• Piracy is basically fighting for freedom of information on the internet, especially when big companies tend to be so overprotective of their intellectual property in situations where they don't really need to

• Free, open source software is basically the future

• The European Union is basically where everyone on Lemmy lives in real life, and if not, it's where everyone wants to live (which is my case given that I'm from Morocco)

Other very notable points that I have when comparing Reddit with Lemmy are the following:

• The community is very passionate yet very small, it kinda feels like Animal Crossing

• Goddammit, having multiple instances federating with each other is such an amazing thing that literally nobody can wholly own the thing and make crappy decisions that end up ruining the whole thing at once (cough cough Twitter)

• API is free, API is free, API is free

• Being such an obscure platform, it has helped me tremendously with cutting down on social media usage due to how insanely addicting it can be at times, sometimes in the worst possible scenarios, like when you have an exam tomorrow

I'm pretty grateful that I made the decision to ditch Reddit for good. I really like this place, and I mean a lot. I wouldn't be called "Resol van Lemmy" if it weren't for Spez being such an ass.

I came over during the Reddit migration but I'm so tired of every post either being about Israel/Palestine, late-stage capitalism, or femboys...

or worse - when the post is about something completely different but the comments are about Israel/Palestine, late-stage capitalism, or femboys...

I had somehow curated my Reddit to be mostly about the topics I wanted to read about, but I can't seem to get that to happen here. I've been blocking communities and instances but my feed is still mostly stuff I don't really want to read about...

I'm currently waiting to see what happens when Reddit IPOs but I doubt I'll go back there and will probably just stop coming to lemmy too.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

My overall analysis is positive. Not a full perfect score, but better than Reddit. (Note: ++/+/=/-/-- indicated in comparison with Reddit, not in absolute terms.)

• [++] Migrating to avoid bad admins works great in practice. And it imposes a limit on how shitty any admin team can be, as nobody wants to see mass exodus from their instances.
• [=] Your typical Lemmy moderator is as clueless as the Reddit one on things like transparency and nurturing a good relationship with the other users.
• [--] Mod tools? Which mod tools?
• [-] Overall less content, even if you're in an instance that doesn't defed other instances willy-nilly. It's still enough to keep you entertained across the day, as casually glancing across threads.
• [++] The userbase used to be better, but it's still leagues above the one in Reddit. Your typical Lemmy user seems way more eager to understand what others say, abler to follow a simple reasoning without "I dun unrurrstand" tier idiocy, and less eager to boss you around with uncalled advice.
• [=] Same fucking love for genetic fallacies here as in Reddit.
• [-] Witch hunting is actually worse here than it is in Reddit.
• [-] As well as intrusive political discussion in non-political posts and communities.

I'm really starting to hate it, but really don't want to go back to Reddit. Every post about Israel and capitalism makes me want to quit. I wish there was a better alternative.

Maybe it’s because there’s less comments, but it’s felt needlessly hostile. Even a small disagreement leads to this weird ‘well you’re obviously a fucking idiot that has nothing worthwhile to say’. I didn’t have that impression when I joined post API BS, but now that I’ve noticed it it’s hard to ignore. A lot of people just reading what they want to read, and drawing conclusions that don’t relate to the immediate action.

I'll bite, I miss the sysadmin and msp communities. I didn't post much ever and won't ever, but I learned a lot there over years. I'm not getting that here, and it's pretty much why I was on reddit.

As a sysadmin, I handle windows, cloud, Linux, networks, BSD, and more daily. But the "Linux desktop is best" crew are more cult than community & my personal desktop is Linux, which I like, but it's not the answer for my parents, my partner or most of my friends or clients.

I gloss over American politics since I'm not American.

I don't hate cars. But I'm an advocate for walkable cities. I love cars in fact. I would quit my job if I could earn enough just restoring cars slowly all day.

But I'm still here. So that's also a statement.

I'm only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I'm very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on

I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don't exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven't even made a post

Sorry, Lemmy, but we're only together because reddit left. You're my rebound

(I'm making this post so that people who love Lemmy can help me understand, not to hate. I want to love Lemmy)

I've been on Lemmy since the reddit migration and every day I dislike it more.

I never understand what people are talking about when they say they like Lemmy for the "closer community", most posts I see barely have any comments, and the ones that are there mostly look no different to what I used to see on Reddit.

the smaller community results in less posts about less topics, so it's difficult for me to find anything I'm interested in. on Reddit I could join dozens of videogame-specific or niche hobby subs and they'd all be at least a little active, here it seems the only posts I can get to show in my feed are environmental and big tech doomerism and occasionally some Linux discussion, with very few memes or otherwise just funny/easy posts. I like talking about Linux, sure, but I don't want a sinking feeling in my gut every time I wanna scroll idly.

there just seems to be a lot of toxicity here on top of everything. I'm constantly seeing people arguing or being rude about Linux opinions, big tech/privacy topics, etc. I worry it's a bit more of an echo chamber than reddit ever was for me as well. I feel there are just a lot of perspectives I'm not getting here.

I left reddit because I hate the business decisions they're making, but every day I get closer to going back. I don't want to support such a shitty company that treats users more like cattle than customers, but I'm struggling to adjust to Lemmy even all these months later.

I'm less settled on Lemmy, but fully settled in the Threadiverse. Basically I see Lemmy like my current Linux distro: It's good and getting the job done, but I'm always watching the next iteration in the ecosystem.

That said, I feel like I've landed on a good host and alternate frontend that I like. And I LOVE that I can choose my host and frontend.

I get attacked by hyperfixated debatelords here just like reddit, 10/10 would recommend as reddit replacement.

Its also interesting that you can recreate an accurate miniature reddit with a fraction of the users, in that regard I guess its a more efficient reddit?

Reddit but with less content (which is fine), I browse by top past 6 or 12 hours, and just check in once or twice a day.

Also I don't know about more mature... There's a lot more people here arguing and gatekeeping and generally being weird about Linux for some reason.

I mean, I like Linux, I use it a lot, but these people make it their identity, like it's an obsession, and they violently hate people who dare to use Windows.

...I get the impression these are actual grown adult men and women, acting like big babies :-P

There's a lot of people here engaging with Linux discussion in a normal healthy manner too of course, just the weird ones are the loudest, you know? It's off putting.

I like it. Just wish niche communities were more active.

I’m starting to see the propaganda bots and spam creep in. I guess that means it’s reaching a certain popularity level.

On Reddit I would feel like I was speaking to one individual all the time. All of the top comments were like they were written by the same person. Here I think everyone is unique

It's about the only place where you could post a photo of a houseplant or something equally random, and people will reply asking why it's not running fucking Linux.

More nerdy than Reddit, more of an emphasis on Star Trek (less Star Wars) and programming/linux memes than anything (at least when browsing Top/New posts). It's a bit higher brow I guess than Reddit, though not nearly as much content. In Reddit, I would very rarely see everything there was to see in a single day if I was looking at the Front Page. It's not too bad though. I'm not going back to Reddit, so I guess I have to smirk at all the Trek jokes now.

Otherwise, still seeing some of the same issues that affected Reddit and some that I never saw there, out-of-control mods, abandoned communities, seemingly intentional misunderstanding of blatant sarcasm, some rudeness (not as much though), and an overly Leftist worldview (I consider myself left-leaning, but it gets kind of ridiculous at times). It's just part of the whole social media thing I guess.

I'm digging it. It reminds of reddit when it was good, which was like digg when it was good, which was like /b/ when... wait, /b/ was never good.

I can handle the Linux fanboys because it's been my daily driver OS since 2003.

I do miss the driversity of topics. Yeah, I'm mostly about my computers and cars, but I like maintaining a surface knowledge of pretty much everything.

Like a lot of people, I came here around the API protests at Reddit. Back then Lemmy was filled with "fuck reddit" circlejerking which was made worse by the relative lack of other content. But I have watched this place grow and mature into something I would consider a suitable replacement for the most part. That said, the amount of content here still pales in comparison to Reddit back when I was actually there. As for all the complaints about the culture here, you get what you dont filter and I filter the trash out of my feed.

For non political content, not bad, of course a lot smaller than reddit, but it's a good start.

But the left wing populism echochamber is a bit annoying. It's ok to have an opinion, but all the silly so easy to refute things that get repeated here over & over again because it sounds nice & fits the agenda is just annoying... "Why do billionaires need more money?" because they're addicted to ego & power, it's not about the money. "The right wing are so violent, we are the good guys", every other thread: eat the rich, prepare the guillotines. -insert a not so common incident that supports an agenda- 'see, this happens all the time, we should do -insert short sighted measure that will just cause different problems-. etc...

I'd love all those topics to be actually seriously discussed here, but so far it feels like it's just edgy teens shouting whatever fits the popular narratatives...

Definitely needs more content, more active communities but on the whole it’s OK. It’s unrealistic to expect it to be as large as other platforms at this time. I’m doing my part by participating in threads that I usually wouldn’t jump into.

Unpopular opinion: it’s very much like Reddit.

It has ridiculous memes that overwhelm the ‘verse.

It has niche subjects that overwhelm the ‘verse.

It has a hive mind that doesn’t like unpopular opinions even if they’re correct.

It’s like Reddit before it started clamping down on things that were distasteful when viewed by advertisers or the general public, which I like.

There’s lots of drama sometimes.

It has mod problems. Sometimes it’s the absence of mods.

It’s attracting bots and karma whores, even though it’s meaningless here. For now.

Sometimes people show up with an agenda and talk at you instead of with you.

Thank goodness asklemmy isn’t overrun with the same damn stupid sexy sex and other same old shit yet.

Overall I’d say it’s better. People realize it’s new and the growing pains that the newness means. People are happier to have a discussion and enjoy the growing variety of the fediverse. People are people, though, and some of the same old stuff is showing up.

I wish that a lot of communities would consolidate. It seems like there was such a rush, and all these people trying to stake out their homesteading claim, that the community with a capital C wasn't able to develop. With reddit, subs would get big and shitty, then you'd see something like,"Hey, join us over at <fill in>. It's like this sub, but with(out) <fill in>". And that spinoff had enough momentum from the start to keep going.

I'm not a sports guy, but it's like there are 30 NBA teams (I don't know the number, don't care, and irrelevant to what I'm attempting to stay). The first community should have been NBA@... until there are enough people visiting so that the fans of TEAMA can go create their own TEAMA@.... As things stand, instead of starting with 30 basketball fans having a common community to bullshit, we ended up with 30 communities with 1 person in each and often zero traffic.

There's a lot of IT/software engineer here. I'm fine with it, especially since I'm a software engineer myself, but it would be better if there's more variants of people here.

Even more US centric. This means that all the political posts are too US-centric, I'm fine with political discussion, but damn, I don't care about that country too much.

It really is fantastic here. Lot’s of cool people with interesting nuanced perspectives. What I miss are the niche subs with solid activity and conversation.

I’m with my people—Linux nerds and fringe liberals. If the horde finally comes for us, I’ll be proud to stand with my Lemmings.

Plus, this place finally got me proficient with Docker, so that was nice.

It's super political and tech based. Feels like if you don't use Linux or Firefox you're an outcast. I still use it often just not as often as I did with reddit.

I find it more neckbeard than Reddit, and I mean that in the most offensive way. Reddit was big enough that there were lots of places they either didn’t participate or were so rare as to not be annoying. They’re everywhere here on the big, fully federated servers.

By the same token, the semi-federated, more restrictive instances (yes, I mean beehaw) are actually quite nice places and really does feel like a mature place to casually discuss things.

In general, though, lemmy is a desert or ghost town of vibrant niche, non-IT focused communities with regular participation.

Technically speaking Lemmy's improved a fair amount since before it blew up in popularity (compared to pre-Reddit API shenanigans), but it's still lacking in a variety of other areas, e.g. moderation tools & lack of any sort of modmail to avoid having to coordinate off-site, user tools/settings related to privacy and federation such as hiding profile elements or the opposite like enabling a microblog-esque mode for federating with Mastodon/Misskey/etc., and some other odds and ends (like not being able to mute/disable notifications for posts/comments, sorry OP!).

Culturally speaking Lemmy has similar problems as other federated platforms in that to this day no one seems to have worked out a way to better communicate them so that they're more widely adopted and grow significantly beyond the early adopter Linux/techie crowds (Mastodon's very gradually been getting there though). Some people also much prefer that, which is part of why and how these platforms have remained that way, but they seem to forget that small communities can exist within larger communities, and with well-developed federated platforms, ideally one could better curate their spaces more than they ever could in more popular corporate platforms.

Also regarding content, it's in a weird spot. There's a decent amount of it, but part of the problem is that it's neither all that varied nor original. There's a glut of news, political/technology mainly, memes/shitposts, many of which being older and thus reposted, and some mix of technology posts in general, then there's kind of everything else. If we were to throw together BS percentages, I'd maybe guess at like 32/32/32 of news/memes/tech, with the remaining 4% being everything else.

The issue then is, much of that content you can easily find on more popular platforms with greater variety and also originality, with potentially timelier posting, so outside of principles, what's the draw of any of the Lemmy instances? I think there's greater potential with more topic-focused instances (e.g. programming.dev/ani.social/etc.) and original content. That is, compared to the corporate models of attempting to be everything for everyone but really no one, and in turn also opaquely barring/removing/demonetizing creative content due to some ambiguous advertiser/copyright compliance measures.

Unfortunately you hit a causal conundrum where there aren't enough people yet for others to justify contributing original material, and there's not enough original material to draw enough people here to justify creating it and on and on. Classic network effect situation, in other words, which in turn also affects variety and timeliness of posts, and leaves everything in an awkward limbo state until several somethings start to change.

It's about the same, but the lower pop moves the page at a glacial pace. One other major difference: less suspicious content. I left Reddit for two reasons. One, negative content experience crowding out the positive. Two, I loved rif. Since the APIcalypse I've bounced around a little bit looking to make a home somewhere. My experience is that tech is great but techies don't always share all the same interests as me. So it feels like there's just not enough diversity in interesting content.

I miss the tiny fan sub I used to run, but it would never take off here, on any instance. I could never go back- Reddit is broken. I just wish more of us left. I don't know that this place has matured, but where it's at right now is good enough to keep scratching my itch for sharing content and ideas online.

To be honest, it's not particularly great. But it sucks less than Reddit, so....

It needs to grow because right now its like 50% people who were banned from reddit because they dont socialize well

I miss the content and niche communities of Reddit. Remember you can still be in both as long as you'd like. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Edit: I also am sad that big news events like the Superbowl don't have nice vibrant live threads. Hopefully we have more good content for non Linux peeps.

Compared to Reddit, it's pretty empty still. On Reddit I literally never saw a post twice on my subscribed feed.

Now I'm subscribed to roughly the same number of communities and it takes 2-3 days for my feed to completely renew... Many of the subreddits I used to frequent still don't even exist on Lemmy, despite them being pretty popular over on Reddit.

Its aight. It reminds me of old web forums and BBS style conversation. There's a lot of passion and intelligence but also incredibly one-sided takes and an unwillingness to empathize or see another person's perspective. I mostly stay for the Picard Maneuver memes.

General meme and news posts feel basically the same as Reddit. A lot more Linux circle jerking, probably a bit more left leaning. I do miss the days before I knew what ml's were though.

I actually appreciate the slower content on Lemmy. Keeps me from continually scrolling for that dopamine hit.

Permanently Deleted

I'm enjoying it somewhat. It's much more populated by people with similar interests to mine, e.g. Linux and D&D, but it's also more populated by aggressive and ignorant commenters who are all too eager to be contrary and smug.

I like the smaller, early internet feeling, but miss the niche communities. Although Reddit is so damn huge that even the niche communities have so many comments that unless you catch something right when it's posted, anything you say gets lost in the flood.

To me, it feels like old Reddit, so it's very comfortable despite all the differences and initial growing pains picking an instance. Like finding an old friend and meeting up with them for lunch after many years.

I like it but tbh I miss the NSFW Gifs/Videos. I also have learned some topics not to talk about. Like Windows/Linux, bashing furries, or anything that is not far left (gender stereotypes, guns, etc.).

I don't browse enough maybe to find active niche communities. Typically spend most of my time browsing all on top 6 hrs. Else I see the same posts for like 2-3 days.

It's a change but feels more like... I'm talking to real people instead of guessing who's a bot.

It's all right. But it's a ghost town compared to reddit.

I'm really hoping that the smaller communities dedicated to a topic start getting more traction, although I'm not doing much myself to make them grow

Very few women

I'm really happy with it. People here are mostly thoughtful, smart, and post interesting content. Less fighting, less toxicity, no shills in political discussions because it's not big enough, no corporate astroturfing (the closest we come to that is adderall spam ha ha).

It feels healthier to me than reddit, which I think I had probably been addicted to. Being on Kbin I never have to run out of content because of the "microblogs" section which has Mastodon, and my multireddit style "collections" (like this news one). But I also find it easier to put my phone down.

Also I find it hilarious that although I do still see occasional screeching about US liberals, over here it's because the poster wants "the libs" to be more left wing not more right wing.

I have noticed that many users are highly technical. I am not technical at all yet I am here because my technical friend showed me how to sign up and which app to use. I think people from marketing background should create guides / poster on how to use Lemmy for people like me who dont have a technical friends.

I miss the hyper niche communities and fandoms but other than that I enjoy it just as much if not more

I really enjoy that in small communities I can come across usernames I recognize and develope an idea of what kind of people they may be or be able to continue a bit that I'd started in another thread.

I like it. It's a bit smaller, but that means I can actually read through most of the comments. It's very slightly left of me, which creates good food for thought as well.

It does run of the issue of having a heavier tankie and "both sides bad" presence, but that's preferable to the alternative. I also like that I recognize some users.

Most importantly? I feel like I'm contributing to a conversation here. On Reddit it was just like shouting my opinion into the void.

It's good, but I really don't want to see as much circlejerking as much as I do.

Unless you want to reduce your feed to the bare minimum, you need to see the the trinity of political posts, Linux conversations and memes.

Honestly, not that great

It was really good at the start of the exodus, when I felt like I could write and be read, instead of missing the post by like an hour and being the 10,000th comment

And the community was good, too But now it seriously feels stagnant in an active way

I don't really know if it's because of Lemmy itself, or because "Eternity for Lemmy" was named after it's update schedule, but every day on this app feels completely identical to every other day Just politics, Linux, and bad memes That is basically the reddit experience, I will admit, but on here there are basically zero active niche communities, and basically deserts of fandoms

I think Lemmy did get a sort method to try and accommodate more niche communities, but like I said "Eternity" is the update schedule, so whatever that may be I don't have access to it

And I think that's a really big thing, actually My app of choice is abandonware compared to other clients, I've reported a bug that gets under my skin 6 months ago and there hasn't been a single update, so i have to live with accidentally opening posts all the time and I hate it

I really really like this client otherwise, but I might just move to a better client or a fork of the same project, I don't know

I also don't have instance blocking, either, so that's fun

I'm trying to like it more but it's just way more depressing than reddit, and the depressing news makes its way into most communities. Maybe I just need to cater my subs a bit more but I wanted like a little bit of news and politics to stay informed otherwise I went on reddit to have fun and destress. Can't really say I can do that here the way it is.

Under populated, but I come here often!

What is kind of putting me off Lemmy is the amount of tankies. I understand they are actually far left from Reddit who migrated, but they're just damn idiots and are simping for Putin (yes, I'm aware that some of them could be St Petersburg-based Russian trolls larping as tankies).

Same. A bit more mature user base (but not too mature. Poop!, teehee....). Plus I like that it's generally smaller, and therefore avoids a lot of the negative effects of huge communities.

not a huge fan to be honest. the discourse has become very toxic, the reddit hivemind was silly but here don't you pretty much have to be an extremist or suffer all manner of rediculous replies. apparently taking a balanced view to literally any topic gives one the label of "fascist" around here, cheapening the word and killing legit discussion.

I liked it when it was mainly that picard dude posting memes

its not the site that's the problem. it's the "community"

Matured? Really? I guess you haven't had a taste of the defederation drama. Users are great, but discussion between admins feel like the constant bickering of small children. And I say this as an admin myself, who at times does take part in those discussions. I think we still have a long way to go, when it comes to being matured.

It sucks up too much of my time. So it's working. 👍

It certainly has its own distinct culture at this point, sometimes annoyingly so. Probably a consequence of the very skewed demographic still making up most of the people here. It also has less content, which is good for the comment quality but bad for scrolling.

Overall I like it here, though I often wish the memes were a bit better. Now I’m not a teenager myself but especially the more generic communities often have a distinct boomer and/or low effort flavor.

Comfortable, but a little meh.

There's a handful of users I see posting and commenting. I read the Everything feed, but most of the posts are US politics, technology (with a FOSS/greybeard bent), or centre-left political takes.

There was a burst of activity during the Reddit exodus, but everything seems to be slowing down. I feel like I see fewer Canadian posts than the summer/early fall.

I appreciate

• the handful of conservatives who are trying to build a community here. We aren't very forgiving to folks outside our Overton window, but it's nice to see other perspectives.

• the Star Trek communities. I don't know if they're posting OC, but it's new to me.

• PugJesus, the Picard Maneuver, and girlfreddy for their posts. Lemmy would be a quiet place without their content.

It’s like Reddit from 2007, if everyone were expecting it to be like Reddit from 2017. (E.g., creating fragmented, fine-grained sub-communities before the coarser-grained communities are saturated.)

Less content but the quality/shit ratio is higher here.

It's a great place to wildly spout crazy nonsense and general gibberish with an underlying theme of overthrowing the system.

I spent some time reading a significant number of the replies, so I'll offer this as a suggestion for some of the repeated themes regarding overbearing political stance, decisive topics, etc:

• encourage and support people discussing matters from an open perspective, trying to take a less decisive stance, or being open to different sides

• encourage people and participate in conversation with people who show compassion or agree to disagree rather than write people off

• ask questions instead of assuming

• sometimes, opinions don't have to be right/wrong

• opinions aren't facts

It's less engaging, same stories hanging around active for days with minimal engagement.

It's just quieter here

It’s mostly Linux and Politics, and most of my niche hobbies (and even most of the non-niche ones) are barely represented here, if at all.

It’s really disappointing. I have always been one to consume content, not create it, and it feels like if you’re not creating content there’s very little of interest. I want to like the app, but I find myself spending more time browsing Reddit in a web browser on my phone rather than using Lemmy.

Sort of like reddit. There's less content, but also less comments just replying "lol, so true" to a political meme. That said, there's also, for some reason, more rape apologism than on reddit. Maybe it's because lemmy is even more male dominated than reddit was or is.

I have ended up in a "view all and block" mode rather than a "subscribe to a curated list" mode because of the smaller community. That means I need to block a lot more communities I am not interested in and users that are just... Outside my window of civility or politics that I can handle. Raging tankies, for example.

Most of the time is great, but there's hive mind here too. If you're against running closed captions on your TV for example. That was the most recent I got bombed for, but there have been other times.

Most of the time it's more adult, but sometimes it's just like Reddit.

It feels like 20 year olds.

If I could just make a dumbass joke comment without someone trying to debate me on it (poorly) I would be sooooo happy.

I've started when lemmy.ml was the only instance, and stopped when !all was populated mostly by posts from lemmygrad.ml. I rejoined once Reddit cut off their API, and it certainly feels like the usual crowd has joined. So far, it has been a pretty effective Reddit replacement for the largest subreddits that migrated (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone), but it's still missing a lot of active smaller communities.

My main complaint is that the default sort type (Active) needs to be tweaked.

The best thing for me: I cut me sm consumption to a fifth of what it used to be. A few minutes Lemmy, a few minutes mastodon and I'm done. There is just enough stuff on here to scratch my itch for some content.

Pros: Smaller, older, more reasonable userbase means participation is (for me at least) less intimidating and more meaningful. The atmosphere is very different and more pleasant. People are generally polite here. Comment fields have more interesting replies and less one-word comments and shit posts and memes and whatnot.

Cons: less content, not really feasible to endlessly scroll as an infinite distraction faucet. The userbase has clearly defined interests and certain fields such as sports don't have particularly good representation here, compared to tech fields for example. Comment fields are emptier.

I really like how when I post a comment on a thread it doesn’t get immediately buried.

What stood out the most to me was when everybody left Reddit and came to Lemmy that everyone helped each other to get settled into Lemmy and the Fediverse - at least where I settled. Knowledge was passed down. More tech savy users answered the questions of new users patiently. Everybody was (and still is) polite in general and it is a pleasure to participate in such an enviroment.

I experienced (and I still do) much more "adult" behaviour within Lemmy, compared to Reddit. I barely have to downvote comments due to bad/ malicious behavior. I think I have had to downvote 3 times within the last 8 months - and one downvote was dedicated to a bot which summarized some news content wrong. Here you can have nice discussions and most comments actually contribute. Less "This"-comments.

I like that Lemmy in general is more left leaning, and also more tech savy. Also, I experienced less gatekeeping than on Reddit - at least, within my home instance. Your experience, however, may differ.

I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.

I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.

There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?

Overall it's ok. The quality of the comments on articles is way better.

The worst part for me as I've detailed in similar threads is that the goldrush to claim all the popular subreddit names makes all those places feel hollow. Most have very little in common with their namesakes and are "anything goes!" communities which leads to homogeny. This is made worse by the internet's apparent need to copy every post from reddit

The other "issue" I have is that with federation comes cross posts and that means seeing the same thing 5 times in a row while browsing All. I don't blame the posters here but it feels like a missed opportunity to properly implement crossposting (like....one post, multiple comment sections)

I wish there was a hide comment function. Other than that, it's fine.

I enjoy it a lot. It feels very non toxic, and it has its own sense of humour.

It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.

The best thing is that there are much less repost bots (both for posts and comments)

Small, fun community. Excellent shitposting experience. 7/10

It's quieter which I love and hate. I don't feel addicted to engaging here which is awesome for my mental health but it can also make it difficult to find instances. I'm still struggling there.

However, when I do comment I find the people to be much more open to discussion. There are actual engaging conversations to be had which has been a great change. It feels less like shouting into the vast nothingness of the internet here, more intimate like a club of people with similar interests. I don't feel scared I'm going to get dogged on, flammed, harassed, othered, or ostracized. There have been times I've shared my Native background when it was important to the convo and everyone's be so fucking cool just treating me like a human being or listening to what I have to contribute from my perspective. Doing that on Reddit was a mixed bag where I would have to worry about the possibility of a sleu of people PMing me or replying with just awful hateful small pp energy racist shit.

Honestly, the bar was in the deepest pits of hell so if Lemmy couldn't shuffle over it I would have lost all hope for humanity lol

My impression is it's got promise but there are a lot of issues that aren't being acknowledged.

The way the federation works on Lemmy has some serious flaws that, until they're addressed, Lemmy will never work nearly as well as reddit did at aggregating content and cultivating a shared community.

That said, it's working fairly well for what it is, it just needs to grow.

I came here after the API falldown and I like how quiet and normal it feels. I like coming across people in different threads and topics and while sometimes I'd like to see/read more content, this also helps me put the phone down.

feels like early reddit but leftist.

which means that sadly, we are vulnerable to an eternal september type situation

As open as discussion seems, it feels like there are still certain opinions that can't be shared because they're simply not the majority, and not even talking about hateful or discriminating points of view.

I like it.

I like a few of these communities, and I've had some nice conversations on some things I'm passionate about. But it seems like the population outside my small communities is dominated by violent wanna-be political activists competing for who can express the most outrageous sentiment.

Advocating against violence against one's parents in a hypothetical situation where a parent developed the wrong US politics not only got me downvoted, but also replied to by some asshole from Australia who wanted to rub it in that I was clearly in the out-group.

I don't normally reply when I see things like that, but after seeing so much vitriol I felt the need to leave a comment. I won't be doing it again.

I found a lot of people who are willing to put effort in posting and commenting.

I first felt like I was missing on news for my niche hobbies but just started going sites directly for news (testing an rss reader this week for the first time in over a decade so that might change). Besides that just looking at the default hot or rising threads hit a lot of what I'm looking for with good discussions.

The Memmy app is reminiscent of Apollo for Reddit (Fuck you Spez) and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. As far as the Fediverse, it’s slowly becoming more and more alive. There is an increasing number of people who really keep it interesting with new content, and I am extremely grateful for them.

I love it here but have one gripe… I can’t play videos in-app. (Maybe it’s just my app’s problem, but it’s a bummer for me.)

Lemmy is entertainment / social media for me, and I’d like to have something like Reddit’s TiktokCringe sub here. I don’t like Reddit and I don’t like Tiktok, but I do like funny videos that are presented to me because people think they are funny rather than because Youtube’s algo thinks it’ll boost an advertiser’s clout. Playing video without having to open another app would be nice.

Beyond that, I love it here. Conversations can actually happen here and I’ve even met people on Lemmy and continued to chat with them outside of the platform on other apps — I’ve never had that happen on any other social media. So cool.

Well, so far I haven’t had anyone crawl through my history for personally identifiable info to email me with threats to my family. So, aces as far as I’m concerned.

That really did happen, not exactly a Reddit thing specifically though. Still, community so far feels far nicer and mature here than the old place had devolved into. IMHO this feels very much like Reddit did after the digg exodus years ago. I am hopefully optimistic about this place and the fediverse in general but I do fear what may happen if the big players are threatened enough and get some legislation passed in their favor.

Reddit where I can block people and without /as much/ absurd delusional nonsense.

I've already started to see posts like "People of Lemmy, blah blah" and posts about username meanings, so it's becoming Reddit. Get off my lawn.

Seeing quite a few comparisons to reddit.

As someone who went to reddit when digg shit the bed all those years ago and in turn came here after the api debacle, this is how it always goes no?

-> Social site has cool features for awhile but is unheard of

-> social site gets adopted by more tech literate people (we are here)

-> social site gets noticed by corps, receives investment and becomes able to handle more people (threads is an attempt at this and what is next)

-> social site gets adopted by millions of average joes

-> enshitification begins as social site/corporations begin to extract money

-> other social sites form from people tired of the diluted content

-> tech literate people leave for smaller social site with cool features

-> cycle continues

I'm settling in just fine here. The people can be a little more on the tankie side in some places, but it's better overall.

I like it. I'm not much into the memes but the communities are much smaller so you get more personal discussions.

It's very much like reddit circa 2008 or so. It feels like the claws of marketing people have no presence here. I dare say the word, it feels like there is freedom of expression. To be free, at least partially, from corporate control.

I like it. Lots of memes, I'm learning a lot. Less people to help, tho.

I never had a reddit account so I used it's implosion as a push off to set me free from 4chan but also not going to that overly policed place.

I think Lemmy is a nice middle ground.

Windows hate and politics. It's nothing like reddit imo but it's all I've got as I've abandoned reddit.

I like the folk here

I do like it here, but would like to see more activity in specific communities like automechanic help or RV repair.

I like how many of the users don't resort to memes or namecalling (not that there aren't a few here and there) and the replies are straightforward

When browsing the home page (this is just my subjective experience) I have to be more active in blocking political based communities (just not my thing, I like being happy) but if there happens to be a community for some niche topic that I'm interested in (it was pretty much guaranteed that there was one for everything on Reddit) the posts and comments are generally higher quality. Less reposts, less bots, etc.

Overall, a more enjoyable experience if I tailor it, but still too small for it to satisfy all of my niche fandom based needs. I'm choosing to stick with it and share it in the hope that it grows enough to do that.

Actually, reading these comments, this place is starting to feel like reddit.

There's absolutely nothing more Reddit than people on Reddit complaining about Reddit and how everyone else on Reddit is shitty and unreasonable (without supplying any context).

So yeah, it seems Lemmy is right on track.

lots of people viewing and few posting so posts get more attention but there's less stuff

also less complaining

TL;DR; Three points:

• my selected communities seem to provide adequate interesting topics - there's always one or two rabbit holes to go down
• I have a voice - commenting here is transparent and not censored as much as Reddit
• I think the average age of contributors here is greater than the sex and shit joke fixated twelve year olds on Reddit which is a good thing

I love the fediverse and especially the threadiverse. I'm okay with Lemmy specifically, but I prefer Kbin, and am looking forward to some entirely different option.

It's not as notable as it was in May or June, before the main Reddit exodus, but it still feels sort of like the early days of the internet here. People have to kind of go out of their way to be here, and the system's a bit wonky and obtuse, so there's a pleasant lack of lazy idiots. And I can actually interact with people who actually have things to say, rather than just wading through regurgitated memes and botspam.

It's much worse than reddit. Mods are total dictators. They ban without any reason, only based on their political views. You criticize Hamas? Banned from worldnews. You're free to spread antisemitic propaganda because it's fine for them. It's the opposite of how it should be in many ways