Ask Lemmy

Easier to actually have a conversation here. Even if you’re on /all.

Whereas on Reddit by the time it reached the main page any comment would be buried so deep you’ll never get a reply.

I'm more likely to have conversations. I tended to lurk pretty deep in threads on Reddit, or on niche hobby communities, but that vibe is much more available here.

There seems to be more good faith discussions here. I see more people apologising, or responding well to being called out. I realise this is largely a function of size of the site, and thus this nice energy is likely fleeting, but I am heartened by it nonetheless; people like us will always exist, and there will always be a place for us (even if we need to make it ourselves).

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.

Lemmy is WAY more left-leaning and instance/community mods are often more trigger-happy when removing comments/banning people.

To be honest, here's the difference: Lemmy has fewer voices. That's mostly it.

I think there's less trolling and fewer bots, but it's not by a lot and that's just for now. If Lemmy gains popularity, it will get just as much negative attention, the main difference will be in moderation.

I never really commented on Reddit.

Here on Lemmy though, I feel like I should.

Also, it feels like that on Reddit, people were commenting and posting mostly to get karma, on Lemmy it's more like people comment to actually say something or to express their opinions.

Most people are more polite here

Most of them are left leaning to various degrees so despite the infighting we're all still on the same team.

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.

There are less women here and that's really saying something

The views expressed are more to the left and much more anti big-tech, which makes sense. Discussions are a bit more civil on average and there seems to be much less blatant karma-farming. At least that's the case on my instance, which blocks some of the more... controversial ones. Speaking of which though, the differences between various instances do shape discussions on Lemmy quite a bit, which Reddit of course doesn't have. You can often have a pretty good guess on a user's attitudes, political views and demeanor just by looking at their instance.

Y'all are way nicer.

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 [email protected] 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.

A lot less conversations about whether ChatGPT was an asshole at his cousin’s wedding

I never comment on posts >100 comments. They'll never get seen. Here? There's a good chance to reply.

People are usually a lot less toxic here, conversations are more civil.

It’s like Reddit from 18 years ago, if everyone then had kept expecting it to work like Reddit from 18 months ago.

Early Reddit had no subreddits, and then it just had a handful of major ones—it wasn’t until it got a much larger user base that all the thousands of niche subreddits became viable. (There were still plenty of conversations about niche topics—they just took place within larger subreddits instead of dedicated subreddits with their own associated infrastructure.) But ex-redditors on lemmy expect those fine-grained niche communities to work right from the start, before there are enough users to keep them all active.

(I wonder if one solution might be for every community to have a designated “parent” community, where if activity falls below a certain threshold posts and subscriptions get temporarily redirected to the parent community until activity picks up again.)

My mom is the target of a significantly smaller proportion of the community here. Maybe they're younger here.

Less repetitive, less "inside" jokes that get spammed, people reply. I got used to arguing so much that I get defensive here, everyone wants to argue over everything on reddit, while here ppl are more likely to show interest.

Far more positive and civil; people actually engage in their replies instead of the stream of recycled quips. Bad faith discussions usually get called out as such; less astroturfing.

Small-ish forums probably help with that too since users run in the same circles and there’s less overall “noise.” It’s also much more imperative to comment on posts since there may not be much engagement otherwise.

Lemmy is far more left than reddit which is impressive because I already felt reddit had a hefty left wing bias. I didn't know how much more left you could get until I got here lol.

The userbase is a much less varied. Being more skewed towards the extremely progressive and tech savvy "nerd" types. Which makes sense.

The quality of conversations here seems better. More actual responses and less "meme dunking" karma type comments.