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.

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.

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.)

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.

Y’all are way nicer.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m not met with slurs or death threats every time I post to an android related community. I always hated posting to android related subreddits because of this, especially considering the fact that the mods would punish me instead of the ones being vulgar/aggressive towards me.

So far the only thing the only “bad” thing that I can recall happening to me in an android community here on Lemmy was that a post I made was removed for “not being specific enough to android”. I personally think that Lemmy isn’t popular enough yet to justify doing that but I do understand their decision.