Hi everyone, I’m new to Lemmy and looking to get involved. I am curious about what major differences you have experienced here vs Reddit as I am hoping this is a nice alternative.
I’ve personally experienced aggressive overreach and biased moderation on Reddit, and I was wondering if you have experienced a different environment here. If so, are there ways to get the word out about sites like this that might be viable alternatives?
More granularly/specifically, are there any topics that you might have discussed on both platforms and had a different experience? What have you seen here that has been a vast upgrade over Reddit? Thanks for any guidance!
Lower traffic. Sort of a given, but reddit has more users. I like elements of this, Lemmy being small makes the vibe more conversational, people also seem more helpful in technical communities on Lemmy than Reddit. But while there’s a quality over quantity, there’s a severe lacking in quantity. Lemmy communities are taking awhile to flesh out and communities I would expect to be somewhat active can go months without a post.
Userbase cultural differences. Reddit is a bit of a catch-all now. Some of the old redditor stereotypes are actually breaking down a little, people aren’t really pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds ready to ackshully your post anymore, they’re just kind of angry and stupid like the rest of the internet. Lemmy users in my experience are either very friendly, pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds, or you quickly find out the real reason they were banned from reddit and came here (racism, from what I can tell). It’s sort of a cross-section of people who would be dissatisfied with reddit in its current state, but hasn’t developed a voice of its own yet.
Moderation seems pretty active so far. I’ve seen a couple of people get banned from communities but it does seem like they were knowingly breaking rules and generally being jerks. I do wonder how well the lower traffic communities are moderated though. I’ve not seen a lot of mod drama or anything here but perhaps I’ve just missed it when it happens.
Toxic wastelands. From what I can see there are big swaths of Lemmy your average user finds to not be worth going to, instances seem to block them by default. It may sound funny, but I actually consider this to be a healthy thing. The fouler the fertilizer the sweeter the flower, I think having concentrated places for weirdos to congregate keeps them from spilling into the rest of the site, and the existence of these places means there’s a substrate of users who will likely stick around, making it so the traffic never dips Lemmy into true obscurity. The trick is keeping them from festering into something truly awful, which I couldn’t begin to guess how to prevent.
I believe that much of the internet’s current issues come from constantly shutting down the weird and toxic places. It just causes them to spread into everywhere else. I think containment is a far better strategy and is closest to how our society worked before the Internet as well. Let the weirdos be weird on their own and out of sight from normal people so you don’t have 12 year olds mixing with not nut jobs on the same platform. Instead they always shut those places down by force and the roaches scatter.