It's really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.

I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.

My hobbies and interests aren't actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.

Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with "loud" voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I'm not saying that doesn't happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it's often amplified here.

One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it's more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.

Less trolls, skills, and spammers. And bots.

But it seems to have a higher percentage of zealots. People go crazy and extreme over some weird stuff. You can't have a casual opinion about Linux here for instance.

I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.

I miss some of the communities I used on reddit that are still either quiet or very quiet over here, but I also recognise that unless I ramp up my participation in them, I haven't really got grounds to feel negative about that. Besides, using social media less is a plus to me.

I love there's no ads, tracking and 'suggestions' - in short, no algorithm. The apps are (mostly) open source and the community are appreciative of that.

I used to get news from reddit and can get it here too, there's no difference in quality or quantity. Politically, I appreciate the de-emphasis on hateful content and it helps I'm on an instance where the Admin is on top of their game in that respect. It is noticeably more left-wing on here but since I am too I guess that's not an issue for me. It's certainly way better than Reddit in that respect where I'd stumble across fairly extreme right-wing opinions in (supposedly) non political subs every day.

People seem, by and large, much calmer and more reasonable here and less inclined to attack en masse. I've noticed a distinct improvement in my overall mental health but I think that might have more to do with not being on reddit than being on here.

Lemmy is what we make it. For those of us who came over in the Summer, Lemmy/KBin is less than 6 months old. Let's not paint it into being one thing or another just yet.

I've been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don't see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I'm one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.

It's fine. I like that it's normal for people to post multi-paragraph comments in response to a post. Gives me plenty of material to read when I'm bored, and this place. Is still small enough that you recognize people in different threads. It's cozy, but some communities could use improvements.

Also, the other things I've noticed is that many of the people complaining about Lemmy being toxic are some of the most argumentative ones themselves,if you don't believe me, you can go to their user page and more often than not find examples of them being rude or unpleasant on the first page.

Misery loves company, after all.

I try to participate more actively on Lemmy than I did on reddit, where I was really just a lurker. I decided to do so in order to support the platform at least a little. I have the impression that a lot of lemmy users feel similar and really do want to care for this project. And that's really cool, I think.

In my opinion, however, the biggest issue with Lemmy has unfortunately changed little in the past 6 months: I think there is still pretty little original content. What's more, the little OC there is easily gets lost in the flood of reposts or screenshots from other platforms. At least that's the impression I get from most of the larger communities (besides from /pics). I think that's a shame since this makes it hard to find and appreciate the content someone took quite some time to make.

As far as interactions with others are concerned, it sometimes bothers me that a whole bunch of Lemmy users seem to have really fixed opinions on certain topics. Those guys don't seem to take arguments into account at all but rather seem to be on some sort of propaganda mission instead. So it seems to me that there are multiple topics that simply can't be discussed in a meaningful way on Lemmy. I think that's a shame as well.

But all in all, I quite like Lemmy for what it is.

At the start it was better, but for about a month now I think there have been more negative interactions than positive ones.

The biggest problem imo is that since Lemmy's userbase is mostly made up of people who left Reddit, they bring their mentality with them. And the two plaforms have hugely different userbases size wise, so if someone says something really stupid on Reddit you can ignore/ block and you can do that with 1000s of people. On Lemmy if you block 1000s of people, you basically just blocked most people who post/ comment.

/rant over

Yeah basically my biggest problem is with how small the userbase is. ( then again I have a few other problems besides that)

I'm asking because I've personally found it far more hostile than Reddit (the only other platform I've put much time into). What I've mostly seen is that people downvote quickly and tend towards eliteism relative to Reddit. That said, I recognize that this could be just by instance or community, so I'm curious how others have found it.

I use Linux btw

I just wish there was a single leftist community on the internet which was academically engaged with contemporary political science instead of simping for shitty autocrats because they want to relitigate the cold war.

It has zero niche reach. Unfortunately, that's really important for the people who try to switch from Reddit. You can't compete with Reddit when your favorite hobby sub there has 20,000 members or even many more and meaningful daily activity.

The people here are mostly more techy and nerdy which leads to niceness but also holier than thou attitudes everywhere.

The content here turns over slower, which is another big sticking point, but the bones of the site are good.

It's suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don't know.

I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don't know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there's maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you'll see most posts have less than ten comments.

Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it's kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.

The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they've essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.

In large part I think it's because Lemmy's discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it's kind of on purpose it's still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.

One of Lemmy's key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there's really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.

On a more personal note, I feel like I'm vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it's dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I'm just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line "butter spread over too much bread" it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I've had a few so I'm rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.

It seems nice and scratches the itch to be approximately social, but suffering through seeing the same 5 articles posted nearly back to back by bots is deeply annoying. And the lack of content when sorting by 6hrs means I inevitably have to spam block the weird porn/fetish stuff that decides to crop up in-between lol.

Lemmy feels like a subset of Reddit.

Certain communities are continuations of those that are/were on Reddit. The "post link to a paywalled article, everyone bitches about the headline" section of the world is a carbon copy. A lot of the technical space...I haven't encountered as many "May God create a deeper, hotter hell for you and your family if you buy Intel over AMD" types here, though this may have been because I haven't really found a substantial PC hardware community.

Commercial Republicanism doesn't seem to be anywhere near as present. The folks with a mossy oak jacket instead of a personality...there's a few of them here but the extremists actually seem to be Stalinites.

The various permutations of No Stupid Questions or Ask Lemmy aren't as dick-in-hand horny as Reddit's were (I'm guessing there's fewer teenagers here), though there's a lot more talk about the platform itself. slow turn to look at OP

Official discussion boards are completely absent. Nobody's ending Youtube videos with "Go check out our Lemmy community." I'll use the example of Coffee Stain Studios' game Satisfactory: Snut still occasionally mentions their subreddit, and while there is a community here, it's A. unofficial and B. almost entirely dead.

The brain trust feels gone. Stuff like r/tipofmytongue or r/whatisthisthing or r/askhistorians just hasn't happened here yet, possibly because of the lower population. I'm less confident that I can get an actual answer to "What's this weird piece of bent metal I found in the back of my grandmother's silverware drawer for?" or "What's that movie where a guy pulls a nuclear bomb with an ATV and gets radiation sickness?" I don't foresee AMA's or anything like that, though it seems that was dying off on Reddit as well.

Moderators overall seem to be doing an amazing job, because the place seems well moderated, I don't really notice the mods doing their jobs as much (possibly because Lemmy doesn't do the deleted by moderator thing that Reddit did for some reason), and I've yet to see or hear about a mod being a human case of pink eye like you'd see so often on Reddit. Use Reddit for awhile and you build up a list of moderator names and the subs they ruin, the same list on Lemmy is still blank so far.

It's still the internet, which means The Worthless are present and accounted for. You know, the "people" who didn't get enough attention as children who exist only to make casual conversation via text impossible via interpreting every sentence as 100% true and literal. Say something like "Raiders of the Lost Ark was better than Last Crusade" and The Worthless are guaranteed to show up and try to lecture you about opinion versus objective fact.

Basically reddit with more Linux posting and few other differences.

I've found more far-left shitposting here than anywhere else on the internet, which might be some people's cup of tea but I find incredibly obnoxious. I'm not even right-leaning. Glad I can block whole instances with the app I use at least

Pros:

• FOSS Everywhere

• So far, no brigading by salty nationalists

• So far, excellent moderation on most communities

• Better UI experience

• It's actually fun to engage in many communities here in all types of conversation and media formats

• Plenty of federated instances to choose from

Cons:

• Specific communities are small or nonexistent

• Not enough user generated content per day that you can waste time on (Maybe this is a good thing lol)

• Instance switching is still a bit of a pain because I am lazy

• Web UI is okay, nothing too special. Including some alternative frontends

• Instance federation is like proto p2p. It's not easily scalable, so it can't automatically react to sudden demand or attention.

Better conversations, and less echo chambers in general. I know exactly who'll disagree with that notion too, but that has been my experience.

The right-wingers that did come over are obviously butthurt to hell since they can't abuse the report function and get backed by obviously biased mods like they do on Reddit. It's easier to simply ignore them here, as well, even though they're around as always.

Hell, half the comments in this very thread seem to be bitching about "Marxism" like it's something that anyone gives half a shit about in today's world. They need their bubble, and they seem to be angry they didn't get this one, too.

Also people are generally more tech-savvy here than there, for obvious reasons. That's a plus.

For me, it’s great. It’s like Reddit honestly, no matter how many would get offended by the comparison, but that’s how it feels to me. I wasn’t a power user there, and I haven’t been here.

I like reading and finding stuff, and that’s been fun and plentiful here too. The comments are much less numerous, but about the same in terms of their content. At least compared to how it was when I left Reddit, and it’s been a while now, maybe it’s changed.

If I want serious and informative and extremely helpful comments, I’ll hop to hackernews at yc. If so want to know what’s up around the world and see cute cats and a few interesting things besides, I’ll just open lemmy and do a short scroll. If I feel like I need a pick-me-up, I’ll read the comments in anything other than news articles regarding war or politics. I get the same feeling I did back in Reddit. There are legitimately funny comments and jokes and such here, and it’s great for what it is.

I haven’t tried tilde, though I did give it a peek back in the day. I feel perfectly at home and content here, combined with hackernews. It’s enough, and since I mostly just do short scrolls here and there and don’t really doom scroll, it’s just very nice.

I love being here, honestly, and have had no complaints after I got over missing Apollo (the client) and then, for a short period, Memmy.

Once the UX got close to what I like, with Voyager, it’s been nice and cozy.

Haven’t missed Reddit at all. I get the exact same experience here personally.

I like it better. Sometimes you do see users being irrational, entitled/whiny or disingenuous, but it's still way less than you'd see in Twitter or Reddit. And I've seen users chewing others for engaging in those three things, frankly that's fucking great.

However I do think that there's lots of room to improve. I'll mention some sore points:

• On disagreement, some users immediately assuming that the others are stupid (lacking reasoning) or ignorant (lacking a piece of info), instead of asking themselves "am I missing something?".
• While witch hunters are not as bad here as in Reddit, they're still bad. If you want to denounce people, basic reading comprehension is obligatory.
• Excessive focus on the words being used to convey something instead of what is being conveyed.
• "WAAAHHH TL;DR!@!@!1" is becoming more and more frequent. If it's too long to read, it's also too long to whine about its length.

I'm a Democratic Socialist so pretty much everyone hates me when I offer my opinions.

With that said, I love Lemmy.

No algorithm and no ads means I get far more positive than negative interactions on average.

There's a different odour.

Better than Reddit. The community is a lot more welcoming, much more friendly and lacks the open hostility of Reddit. Frankly I hope Lemmy doesn't become mainstream, as much as I want Spez's empire to fall.

Super cool at first, but slowly becoming more and more like Reddit.

Only a matter of time before it becomes a less moderated version of Reddit.