It depends on your values. In terms of front page content it's pretty similar, except with more Linux. The niche communities are kind of lacking, but then you get to have entire hobbyist run niche servers like the one I'm on.

IMO that's where lemmy really shines: as a truly community owned collection of boards.

I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit's way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.

In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit's) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was "avoiding a ban" with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).

Since then it's been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they've been autobanning any new accounts I tried to set up. I've been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point. That's on my 8+ year old account..

Previously I also got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn't even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for "participating" in the brigade thing.

It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They're all only playing their own little agendas. They're only destroying their own community with stuff like this. I miss my favorite communities, but I absolutely don't miss the garbage surrounding it.

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

If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn't "brigading"... As for it being better....the mods alone make it 1000x better.

It's not, but it's old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I'll take it.

LEMMY HAS THE CRUMBGRABBER. THAT IS WHY REDDIT HAS NO CHANCE.

The mods and admins aren't usually far-right radical preppers, that creates a more pleasant environment.

You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)

Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you "If you say that again I'll ban you from the entire network". And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It's freedom.

Welcome to Lemmy! Enjoy your stay.

The functions are more or less supposed to be like how Reddit used to be (a link, comment, information and sometimes image aggregator). Here are some differences, though:

• Many varieties of apps to access the Lemmy API (the reason why many people had migrated from Reddit in 2023 to begin with). It's even partially compatible with Mastodon apps/accounts (the Fediverse's closest analogue to Twitter)
• Power tripping asshole mods and admins exist here just like anywhere else, but they alone can't ruin all of Lemmy, unlike Reddit. Even the original creators, despite holding a couple of disagreeable and harmful views, has made something that's larger than themselves.
• There's isn't a dedicated team tied to deepening the owner's pockets by finding ways to make the experience worse. Development progress is slow but it is continually in the interest of the community.
• No ads! But please try to support your instance if you can!
• A public modlog makes a huge difference, even if the mod action originators are still anonymous. By being honest with which of your account(s) were unfairly banned/silenced, you can make a public appeal (just in the form of a post from another instance). If it is a case of the aforementioned power-trippers, extreme bias, or tyrannical rules (but some instances like Beehaw have strict rules for good reason), then it is easy for everyone to see that, and you can make your home on the new Lemmy instance and have a good time. If you're just a piece of shit troll, that's also clear as day and then none of the networks will want you and ban you independently or you will get such notoriety that you will be blocked/banned/defederated.

At the end of the day, we all loved Reddit at one point, but it is clear where it is heading with all the random mtx stuff, adding some annoying standard social media features, making asshole greedy corpo decisions etc.
One big one for me is that the opinions seems a lot more varied, but I think Reddit has been flooded with bots for the past few years.

It’s not owned by a conglomerate that has the misaligned goal of harvesting your data for profit. The fediverse’s goals far closer match the goals of the average poster.

But don’t think this solves the human condition. As a whole we are attention seeking, validation needing, ass holes every single one. I wouldn’t expect much difference in the posters or the mods.

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).

I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you're a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.

The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.

At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they're lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.

You can’t really get kicked off.

The votes don't matter. Reddit trains you to be addicted to the endorphins from updoots. The more you use Lemmy, you find that no one cares about karma, half the people sort by "new" anyway, and even if you wanted to know your karma, you'd probably have to figure it out with pencil and paper yourself.

It's easier to start new communities, there is a mod log that shows everything the mods do, and if something is off, you can generally just send a message to the server admin(s) and they will reply. You know, like normal human beings.

There are fewer people, which means less content, but also more of a community feeling. It's like how reddit used to be in the good ol' days.

Check out the different clients available at LemmyApps.com or the Lemmy Apps Directory.

To me the way it's better is that it's more free in a sense. For one it does not even attempt to limit what software you use for browsing it, but also if you very dislike certain people/content, like-minded people can host their server without losing access to most of the other content, while being able to block the unwelcome instances and users.

Downvote brigading is not a technical problem though, but a people problem, isn't it? So the solution against that would be stricter moderation, maybe banning a few more instances (but that's not really a good solution unless it's very extreme), and making people downvote less.
Hmm, thinking about it, maybe a daily per-user "downvote budget" would be an interesting experiment? To see if it would be effective. Or with an other interval, but still not too long, and maybe partly connected to account active days (not account age).

It’s not controlled by one single entity. Everyone can spin up their own instance and host their communities, and you can block instances that deserve it. And the software is completely open source and stuff, and it obviously works with all kinds of third-party clients and doesn’t try to monetize the API. And we don’t have spez, so that’s of course another benefit. And no ads! I could go on and on…

Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays

I wouldn't say "better", because then people will assume, as you have, that it solves all of the problems with Reddit. Lemmy solves certain specific problems that are evident on Reddit. Namely the centralized ownership of the platform and the enshittification that can result from that.

It doesn't solve the problem of certain bad-faith user behaviours like downvote brigading, trolling, etc. If anything, those problems are a bit worse in the fediverse since ban evasion is really easy. We recently had a problem with a troll who spent two months posting incel stuff to a variety of different communities, and when he got banned from one instance he would just create a new account with a different instance. He went through like 15 accounts, though he does appear to have finally given up as of a week ago.

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.

No spez?

It's more Linux memes for me.

Typical comment quality is off the chain. Leddit has been going downhill for years in this area.