I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.

It's called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.

If we instead say "no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here", then we're doomed to go down the same path.

There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.

This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.

I'd like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.

I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.

Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.

This is how Reddit felt 15 years ago. This too can slide in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to be cautious

No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago

It's not run to maximize shareholder value

One key difference I found is the lack of user karma. You have no incentive to post something "just to get karma" because there is no global karma on your profile.

This encourages to post what you want to post instead of posting something that someone posted years ago because it's easy free karma

I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:

1. There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don't want to see.

2. At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.

It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:

http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven't figured it out yet, fortunately.

It does feel fresh though, like Reddit did when Digg first ate shit and everyone left for Reddit

Because I’m here (see username)

The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we're more likely to deal with a new website that's not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there's less content.

I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).

It's very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)

I have also noticed the absence of alt-right/populist right-wing people. But that could go under your point 2. It's refreshing nevertheless.

Also less guerilla marketing. Not missing that shit one bit.

It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.

As much as I'd love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we're seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more "twitter" feel.

I'm sure over time it'll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it's community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it's centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn't much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it's a lot easier for people to "move" over to the new one.

I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100's of millions of users like Reddit does, you're going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on

Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.

I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.

Here, people still feel as guests whereas on reddit, people stayed long enough to feel the place is their's.

("old timers shouln't have to deal with this shit again")

Agree on all your points! Not trying to sound arrogant here but I think content gets a lot more "bland" with more users, or at least in communities without great passion. It's much more personal here and posts generally puts interesting thoughts in my head as opposed to reddit.

Likely you aren't seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It's not curated to bait you.

You don't have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there's a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.

This is a group of like-minded, technology-affluent users that most likely have a higher average age than Reddit.

I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.

Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there's less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.

Aside of people probably being a few years older. Less bots and astroturfing and I bet most people who moved to Lemmy are not your average mainstream user, usually more informed than average. It's easier to talk to calm people instead of the "whoosh I got you buddy" person. With fewer user the chance to get heard and not drowned by meme and joke replies is also much higher. But when more user join this likely changes.

It seems like the people who actually cared about Reddit and the community left for Lemmy (and others). It definitely shows.

Reddit will learn very quickly that there is nothing particularly special about it. It's a forum. With the people who posted and moderated on there being chased away or even banned, there isn't going to be much of value left on Reddit going forward.

In addition to what everyone has said, Lemmy doesn't have an established culture compared to Reddit. No in-jokes like the poop knife for example

It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.

1. Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
2. people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
3. There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.

You kind of notice how annoying all that corporate fluff and UI optimized to serve you advertising is when it’s gone.

Passion. The people here care enough to have not only left Reddit, but to have made a new community here.

I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn't manage to do it is way too high

For me the vibe here resembles that of hacker news. So I’m inclined to think the population here is early adopters and technically inclined.

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much but right now it’s mainly the Reddit power users that are here. The normies are wondering why interesting as fuck was flooded with porn as of last night.

I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.