Hey everyone, I’m new here and just testing the waters. I’ve been on Reddit for years, but lately it feels like a mix of heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried.
For those of you who’ve spent real time on Lemmy: • What do you like better here than on Reddit? • What do you miss from Reddit? • Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
I’m curious how people see it — especially those who made the switch after the API drama.
There are exceptions to all of the points below, but generally:
Everyone is here trying to build something better. The developers making the software are actually prioritizing transparency and user choice. Since the instances aren’t after profit, there’s no financial conflict of interest. It’s actually possible to prioritize a healthy community and user experience instead of making a profit.
Activity in niche communities, but that’s changing slowly.
Also, as a mod, we could still use better moderation tooling.
I think over time it will become similar, and at the end of the day, a number of the issues are because of how groups of humans interact and not the platform itself.
However, the reason I’m here instead of the many other Reddit alternatives is because of federation. I believe that as long as we maintain a healthy balance in the fediverse (and not let one entity control too much), we can avoid the enshitification while centralized social media becomes unbearable for more and more people.
Actually, two other things I do miss from Reddit: In the heyday (and even still to some extent now), it was so massive that you could have whole communities of types of real-world people you would never interact with. There is a subreddit for cops, one for air traffic controllers, one for sex workers, one for working historians to answer the general public’s questions, and so on. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ghislaine Maxwell had active Reddit accounts. You could come into contact (in their weird text-box-only way) with people you would never come in contact with, and more to the point you could see what their hivemind looked like and their consensus on public issues. I always liked Reddit’s community model better than the twitter “everything goes on the pile” model, because you could have these for-real communities develop, and it was fascinating sometimes to see what they thought of things or watch them in action.
Edit: Oh, the other thing, AMAs of real public figures, similar idea
That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought about the AMA angle or how unique those niche pro communities were. Thanks for sharing that, definitely gives me a better picture of what people feel is missing.