Welcome, it’s not better.

If you only look on the surface- it really isn’t. Hive-mind mentality, power tripping mods….

It’s essentially the same thing but with a far-left theme.

Now… under the hood? Entirely different.

Less chat bots on Lemmy, and they seem to be easily identifiable and ignored/reported.

Lemmy isn’t quite at that sweet spot where there are enough daily users to get niche content and information from a group of knowledgeable people - but some communities seem to be quite active and helpful already.

I’d love to get to the point where we have a big science/history community and get some non-celebrity AMA’s that have genuine interaction.

I’m more than happy for Lemmy to stay “underground” for a good while, slowly building communities. Once things hit a critical mass and wind up on corporate radar, lemmy will get swarmed and another migration will happen with the same core groups that joined lemmy early.

Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.

It tells you when there are new comments on a post u already saw. Getting down voted and whatnot is a reflection on the ppl doing it not the system they’re using

I feel like actual humans read my comments here most of the time. It’s pretty small still, but it’s growing!

spez has no power here.

To echo, it’s not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It’s not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren’t killed for no good reason over here.

Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed…not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There’s less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.

I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.

But the memes can be really good, it’s still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how “the other side” thinks, possibly even why.

It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).

Users are kinder, discussion is better. There’s no need to drive engagement so there’s no algo pushing conflict and outrage to the fore.

Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.

I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.

I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.

I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.

The main point is that nobody owns the whole, so nobody can fuck it whole up, not even admins - like Steve “Greedy Pigboy” Huffman did with Reddit.

Past that, it’s mostly community tendencies and software differences, not “hard” contrasts:

• Yes, you can be vote-brigaded here. There’s no global karma though, so no big consequence for being vote-brigaded.
• Disingenuous, whiny, assumptive, fallacious, “lol lmao” users (you know… like the typical Reddit user) are present here, but I feel like the ratio of those users vs. decent people is smaller here.
• Some mods are arseholes, some are decent, nothing changes in this matter. However it’s easier to get away from arsehole mods here.
• Blocking here is not a way to prevent being contacted further. It’s just a way to remove an annoyance from your sight, like it used to be in Reddit. If being harassed, contact the relevant admins.

Additionally people often say that echo chambers here are stronger, but I might not be the best person to ponder about this (as I’m left-wing in both social and economical matters, so… if there’s an echo chamber I’m part of it).

You’re on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won’t see much difference in culture there, but that’s what I consider the main advantage.

As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn’t particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.

The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it’s consistently been the exact opposite of that.

I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one

Everyone’s talking about the tech, but I’ll talk about the user base. When you make a post or comment on Reddit, it often feels like you get lost in some black hole of other posts or comments. No one sees your comment because there are 1000 other comments on the same post.

At Lemmy, there are fewer users and fewer comments, but your comments actually get seen. People upvote. I weirdly get way more upvotes at Lemmy than I did at Reddit, in spite of the smaller user base here. Because of that, I’m way more active here than I was on Reddit.