Everyone here isn’t a smug dick who thinks they’re a fucking comedian, trying to one-up you, or splitting hairs over pedantic bullshit like it proves something.

Mentioning Windows in a poaitive context vs Linux results in al.oat crucifixation. /s

The views expressed are more to the left and much more anti big-tech, which makes sense. Discussions are a bit more civil on average and there seems to be much less blatant karma-farming. At least that’s the case on my instance, which blocks some of the more… controversial ones. Speaking of which though, the differences between various instances do shape discussions on Lemmy quite a bit, which Reddit of course doesn’t have. You can often have a pretty good guess on a user’s attitudes, political views and demeanor just by looking at their instance.

The behavior doesn’t feel much different, but the smaller community makes it more common for people to engage with you, and that makes it feel more like a community.

People here aren’t immediatly hostile if you say positive things about Linux.

I never really commented on Reddit.

Here on Lemmy though, I feel like I should.

Also, it feels like that on Reddit, people were commenting and posting mostly to get karma, on Lemmy it’s more like people comment to actually say something or to express their opinions.

I’m more likely to have conversations. I tended to lurk pretty deep in threads on Reddit, or on niche hobby communities, but that vibe is much more available here.

There seems to be more good faith discussions here. I see more people apologising, or responding well to being called out. I realise this is largely a function of size of the site, and thus this nice energy is likely fleeting, but I am heartened by it nonetheless; people like us will always exist, and there will always be a place for us (even if we need to make it ourselves).

Easier to actually have a conversation here. Even if you’re on /all.

Whereas on Reddit by the time it reached the main page any comment would be buried so deep you’ll never get a reply.

Lemmy is WAY more left-leaning and instance/community mods are often more trigger-happy when removing comments/banning people.

It’s been less “mechanistic” so far: fewer canned replies, fewer “oh this post again”. It’s partly because of there being very few bots and less astroturfing, but also I think it’s just the mindset, people here may be less likely to be passive consumers. On reddit I kept having the issue of people misreading everything I posted, because they barely cared about what they had on their screen and wanted everything on it to cater to their taste. Big social networks encourage a form of algorithmic solipsism.

You might need to be more specific, since there is a new wave of former redditors joining.

As a former redditor, who joined ~2 years ago, it was very friendly and wholesome when I joined, but has been getting more toxic in recent times.

Most people are more polite here

Most of them are left leaning to various degrees so despite the infighting we’re all still on the same team.

People are usually a lot less toxic here, conversations are more civil.

To be honest, here’s the difference: Lemmy has fewer voices. That’s mostly it.

I think there’s less trolling and fewer bots, but it’s not by a lot and that’s just for now. If Lemmy gains popularity, it will get just as much negative attention, the main difference will be in moderation.

Less repetitive, less “inside” jokes that get spammed, people reply. I got used to arguing so much that I get defensive here, everyone wants to argue over everything on reddit, while here ppl are more likely to show interest.