Realistically, I just thought it would be slightly better, just because it was a little bit lesser known as a website, and I am consistently longing for older styles of internet engagement. The de-federated nature is nice, sure, but I really don't tend to care about that shit too much. Reddit had their whole api debacle, I'm sure old-reddit getting canned is on the table if not for apparently necessary moderation stuff that's still locked behind it. But I dunno, I still have browser extensions on mobile firefox that send me to a perfect libreddit redirect that works almost every time, so functionally it's sort of identical to what I was already doing, if not more convenient, because I don't have to deal with a reddit app substitute's search engine when I want to find stuff, I can just look it up, click on the link, blam, redirect. Not a big issue. The biggest problem for me with the API shit is that everyone decided to throw a bitch fit and completely delete their posts, so like a quarter of the things saved to this useful compilation of internet knowledge is kinda just gone. Except for unddit, but that shit's probably going to die at some point now that it doesn't serve a non-archival purpose.

With that said, I think I've found lemmy to be basically the exact same as reddit, give or take. It is just as relentlessly annoying as reddit is, and it has less diversity in terms of subject matter, as a whole. There's basically politics, i.e. inevitable "both-sides"-ism and vote shaming, technology stuff, i.e. stuff that is just linux, and like, assorted general posts, which are going to be comprised of either of the former two categories of thing, and gen-x pop culture references. Any other topic that comes up is a complete toss up, and will probably get commented on by a bunch of brainlets who think they know more than they do, but are actually just parroting the super standard talking points, or whatever they learned in high school.

You also get reddit posting habits, where people tend to mostly respond to the lowest effort meme posts, or horrible headlined news articles, rather than well-written posts or longer writeups. You also get that annoying thing where people just reply with sarcastic remarks that only serve their own self-satisfaction, instead of being critical of their own engagement for a half-second. I guess those are mostly just modern internet phenomenon in general, but it doesn't make it any less annoying, for sure.

The problem you will inevitably find with any forum organized around topics is that there's really just not that much to talk about, for most subject matters, so you either prevent communities from forming wholesale, or, more realistically, you just get insular garbage communities where people end up repeating almost the same exact conversations over and over. I think probably the unsung reasons that most old forums died isn't because of centralization, you know, digg and reddit, but it's because they all talked about everything already. Have a post? Oops, someone already asked that question in 2009, here's the thread, should've looked in the catalogue, you should go there, looks like it also never got answered and it's inactive, fuck you have a nice day. Reddit's only addition to that is the ability for people to post le relevant xkcd link, and we kinda already had/have somethingawful for that, for when you want to just talk, more than you wanna actually talk about something specific.

More seriously, I think my biggest problem is just that reddit, and by extension lemmy, kinda breaks the conventional format of the forum, in favor of something that kinda works less well but is more low-rent to engage with. Used to be that you would just browse a bunch of post titles, click on one, and get greeted with likely a huge customized post, maybe a compilation of all the past posts on a topic, maybe a couple links and natively hosted images thrown in there for good measure. Most reddit posts are just like, a single article, or a single video of something stupid happening. That's a major downgrade, imo.