Lemmy probably feels like Reddit when it first started, all warm cuddly and friendly to newcomers eager to discuss and collaborate around central topics.
I joined reddit on the tailwind, so it was all echo chamber, we hate newcomers, gatekeeping, automod frenzy, too many rulebreakers, too many rules, etc I could be wrong, but thats what I imagine it used to be like.
Lemmy didn't take off until well into May 2023, despite being online and open source for over 4 years. The quantity of posts, communities, comments was very small for 4 years online.
Then everyone flocked out of hate and anger of an API money matter with Reddit.Then crowds got hate-filled and angry when Threads was launched by Meta/Instagram/Facebook on July 5. And crowds became hate-filled and angry over Elon Musk rename of Twitter to X on July 23.
Outside big growth in memes and shitposts, there haven't been big numbers of people flocking here out of organic goodness on organized topics. It has largely been a HiveMind of hate as a motivation to come here since May.
Some good seeds have been planted since May, but the atmosphere of hate motivates change is pretty much Mob Mentality / reactionary.
Definitely, you can also see that on certain communities, there are very strong opinions which don't allow for discussion.
Say anything that goes against the grain and you will be shunned immediately.
Also - not that that is always a bad thing but Lemmy is extremely left leaning and you just can't discuss certain topics here at all.
(Guns are always bad / Cars should all be banned and traded for bicycles / traveling by plane is bad and you should feel horrible for destroying the environment..)
What I enjoyed about early reddit was the tech/nerd focused community that did not try to push their political opinion into every thread.
Basically the worst part of reddit is already here, just that the echo chambers are smaller for now.
As someone who was on Reddit when it was young I am going to disagree with you here. Young Reddit was absolutely full of political ideology. It was a Ron Paul, legalize weed, atheist, soft anti feminist, cypher punk, USA style libertarian pool of ideology.
All places have an ideology. We are all constantly swimming in ideology. It’s just when an ideology matches you (either you being molded by the ideology or you joining a place with a matching ideology) you don’t notice it. A fish only has to think about the medium it is in after it is pulled out of the water.
It was a Ron Paul, legalize weed, atheist, soft anti feminist, cypher punk, USA style libertarian pool of ideology
It's funny that I wasn't even on reddit back then but I remember that time and the kind of people who existed back then and they were definitely redditors.