If I could just make a dumbass joke comment without someone trying to debate me on it (poorly) I would be sooooo happy.

It feels like 20 year olds.

Sort of like reddit. There's less content, but also less comments just replying "lol, so true" to a political meme. That said, there's also, for some reason, more rape apologism than on reddit. Maybe it's because lemmy is even more male dominated than reddit was or is.

I enjoy it a lot. It feels very non toxic, and it has its own sense of humour.

I've started when lemmy.ml was the only instance, and stopped when !all was populated mostly by posts from lemmygrad.ml. I rejoined once Reddit cut off their API, and it certainly feels like the usual crowd has joined. So far, it has been a pretty effective Reddit replacement for the largest subreddits that migrated (!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone), but it's still missing a lot of active smaller communities.

My main complaint is that the default sort type (Active) needs to be tweaked.

What stood out the most to me was when everybody left Reddit and came to Lemmy that everyone helped each other to get settled into Lemmy and the Fediverse - at least where I settled. Knowledge was passed down. More tech savy users answered the questions of new users patiently. Everybody was (and still is) polite in general and it is a pleasure to participate in such an enviroment.

I experienced (and I still do) much more "adult" behaviour within Lemmy, compared to Reddit. I barely have to downvote comments due to bad/ malicious behavior. I think I have had to downvote 3 times within the last 8 months - and one downvote was dedicated to a bot which summarized some news content wrong. Here you can have nice discussions and most comments actually contribute. Less "This"-comments.

I like that Lemmy in general is more left leaning, and also more tech savy. Also, I experienced less gatekeeping than on Reddit - at least, within my home instance. Your experience, however, may differ.

The best thing for me: I cut me sm consumption to a fifth of what it used to be. A few minutes Lemmy, a few minutes mastodon and I'm done. There is just enough stuff on here to scratch my itch for some content.

feels like early reddit but leftist.

which means that sadly, we are vulnerable to an eternal september type situation

Seeing quite a few comparisons to reddit.

As someone who went to reddit when digg shit the bed all those years ago and in turn came here after the api debacle, this is how it always goes no?

-> Social site has cool features for awhile but is unheard of

-> social site gets adopted by more tech literate people (we are here)

-> social site gets noticed by corps, receives investment and becomes able to handle more people (threads is an attempt at this and what is next)

-> social site gets adopted by millions of average joes

-> enshitification begins as social site/corporations begin to extract money

-> other social sites form from people tired of the diluted content

-> tech literate people leave for smaller social site with cool features

-> cycle continues

I'm settling in just fine here. The people can be a little more on the tankie side in some places, but it's better overall.

My impression is it's got promise but there are a lot of issues that aren't being acknowledged.

The way the federation works on Lemmy has some serious flaws that, until they're addressed, Lemmy will never work nearly as well as reddit did at aggregating content and cultivating a shared community.

That said, it's working fairly well for what it is, it just needs to grow.

I'm still put off by the sheer lack of comments on some communities like the main videos community on lemmy.world, where videos that'll have tens of thousands of comments on Reddit will have 100 votes, but 1-2 comments.

I miss a lot of niche subreddits like /r/HajimeNoIppo, /r/BJJ, and /r/IBS, but I can live without. What would be great is if the big communities had more engagement.

There also seems to be a lot of duplication of communities across instances. While I get the whole decentralised thing, it's pretty pointless to not have a mechanism to merge/join communities across instances that have the same topic. Why should lemmy.world and kbin have two competing pro-wrestling communities when neither gets a lot of posts/comments?

I wish there was a hide comment function. Other than that, it's fine.

Overall it's ok. The quality of the comments on articles is way better.

The worst part for me as I've detailed in similar threads is that the goldrush to claim all the popular subreddit names makes all those places feel hollow. Most have very little in common with their namesakes and are "anything goes!" communities which leads to homogeny. This is made worse by the internet's apparent need to copy every post from reddit

The other "issue" I have is that with federation comes cross posts and that means seeing the same thing 5 times in a row while browsing All. I don't blame the posters here but it feels like a missed opportunity to properly implement crossposting (like....one post, multiple comment sections)

It’s a bit like you read a news story about something that happened in Australia, and all the comments are about second amendment rights and the Supreme Court. So pretty much normal Internet.

I really like how when I post a comment on a thread it doesn’t get immediately buried.

I like it.

I like a few of these communities, and I've had some nice conversations on some things I'm passionate about. But it seems like the population outside my small communities is dominated by violent wanna-be political activists competing for who can express the most outrageous sentiment.

Advocating against violence against one's parents in a hypothetical situation where a parent developed the wrong US politics not only got me downvoted, but also replied to by some asshole from Australia who wanted to rub it in that I was clearly in the out-group.

I don't normally reply when I see things like that, but after seeing so much vitriol I felt the need to leave a comment. I won't be doing it again.

Pros: Smaller, older, more reasonable userbase means participation is (for me at least) less intimidating and more meaningful. The atmosphere is very different and more pleasant. People are generally polite here. Comment fields have more interesting replies and less one-word comments and shit posts and memes and whatnot.

Cons: less content, not really feasible to endlessly scroll as an infinite distraction faucet. The userbase has clearly defined interests and certain fields such as sports don't have particularly good representation here, compared to tech fields for example. Comment fields are emptier.

I found a lot of people who are willing to put effort in posting and commenting.

Actually, reading these comments, this place is starting to feel like reddit.

There's absolutely nothing more Reddit than people on Reddit complaining about Reddit and how everyone else on Reddit is shitty and unreasonable (without supplying any context).

So yeah, it seems Lemmy is right on track.