Thanks, all really good feedback. I’ve managed to find a few ‘somewhat’ active communities to join like for my local city which has about 1000~ subscribers. Not as bad as I was expecting to be honest… that’s enough user base for me to give Lemmy a shot I think.

I guess every social media platform has its politics

I’ve always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?

If you block sufficient leftist/marxist instances and communities, you might not notice that this is essentially a socialist fanboy wannabe utopia.

I’d suggest to browse Lemmy by new, block a lot, refresh a couple times, and then eventually arrive at a curated, sanitized feed.

But Lemmy is far from unpolitical, merely a different color.

First welcome a lot of the users here are ex reddit

Lemmy is young it doesn’t quite have the traffic reddit does BUT it also has less of the crap.

Lemmy is significantly smaller. Because of this:

+Trolls are easier to spot

+Interactions tend to be friendlier and more wholesome/respectful

+Far more originality shining through

-less engaged communities

-fewer niche communities

-no rich history to comb through

First of all, welcome.

Depends what you’re after, really. I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.

If your opinion is considered garbage, you’ll probably be downvoted for it, but banned is another thing; You can find an instance more to your liking, for example if you post tankie stuff on lemmygrad, you’ll probably only get praise from there.

It mostly comes down to how a platform with many people tend to naturally operate - garbage people get treated at such by the rest. So whatever your leanings might be, I suggest you find an instance that is somewhat reasonally close to share your values.

Other than that, one of the main differences from reddit is the content quantity - Smaller user base means less content. And I’m perfectly fine with that, as I can keep up with the feed without scrolling for hours.

I think it’s the same echo chamber here, but it’s smaller. People block instances they don’t like, and are in favor of moderators removing controversial things, specially around communism and tankies.

I just like that it’s not run by big tech. Just discussions, no companies or ads. I think most users are tech people.

Welcome. Its been great for me so far. Whatever instance you are currently on the amount of politics and echo chamber does matter. So feel free to comment and enjoy. If you have a complaint try another instance (or even Kbin) to see if this helps. Also to note that there is much more control about what communities and people you can interact with

but without the politics and without being overly-policed

Lemmy doesn’t really do anything to address either of these.

Not really.

It's a good alternative to what I used to do with my free time, worm charming. It's not the same without a cobra.

Lemmy is fickle but it’s ok. Works the same but smaller, so you might be stuck on “all”.

I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.

There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.

But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.

It’s a bit ‘terminally online’ at times, but only a bit more than Reddit

Honestly? No

The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.

But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn’t fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah…

Which… is kind of message boards. Reddit was “successful” because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different “cultures” and so forth.

That said: I can’t help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media… ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can’t get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said “Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let’s actually make a good town hall site” and… we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more “Wait, what are you trying to say?” kind of comments.

And… I am not sure what “lemmy” can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the… terrorist threats. But unless “lemmy” can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit… it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won’t be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.

Eh it’s slightly like Reddit in the sense you have to walk on eggshells. If you look at the Modlogs, in my case for example, you’ll see I had comments deleted because it appeared to be disrespectful? Someone who I was responding to decided to label my response as having an, “attitude”… I’m too old to be a d*ck to people online - unless of course I’m returning the favor but even then I mostly brush it off and I don’t go crying to the mods or reporting comments. Sticks and stones and all that.

But so far while the community is much smaller, it’s definitely a lot more open to discourse between people with different/opposing views, or so it seems so far except you will definitely get downvoted for opposing views.

The echo-chamberiness of Lemmy is different from Reddit, but still a thing unfortunately. It'll really depend on the community you're in, but since the population of the Fediverse (and especially the Threadiverse) is very small compared to Reddit you tend to have the same people cropping up a lot. I haven't been banned from anywhere (that I know of - I don't actually know if I would get notified) but I find myself hammered with downvotes more frequently here than on Reddit when I say something unpopular.

I'd say, mess around a bit and see.

Its the same small group vibe reddit lost when they got big and greedy. You will actually learn names outside of the top reposter.

The only thing I miss is the really neiche communities. There's some but they struggle to take off due to the smaller user base.

You do have to look though a few different servers till you find one that fits what you want. Mods are still clowns depending on the server. Avoid the top few instances to avoid power trippers. Some things never change.

I basically found a cozy server and settled in after nukeing my reddit account. I don't miss reddit.

I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber.

Lemmy is a collection of independent echo chambers that believe different things. You can make an account on some instance you never heard of before and get people assuming you have certain beliefs just because of your instance because apparently a lot of people stick primary to their home instance? In one instance, you have an echo chamber of “bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE” and other echo chambers that say things like “I won’t vote for someone who aids in genocide”.

Some instances block more instances than others (the one you are on has blocked 172 instances, for example). And some instances are blocked by a lot of instances (lemmygrad is blocked by 89 instances). Also some instances disable downvoting, if that’s something you’re interested in.

I don’t think overpolicing is an issue in most places? Like, there’s that one person who openly is pro-genocide in all of the palestine-related threads (like, they explicitly call for killing of even infants and that anything less is antisemitism) and I guess they’re tolerated (just probably one of the most heavily downvoted people on lemmy). But if they’re on an instance without downvotes, they wouldn’t even see them.

I like Lemmy as a substitute for a general non-specific social forum to engage with others. It’s not as popular so it’s more intimate here.

What’s missing is the general popularity and existence of robust communities. I think this is a good thing because it drives me to find other more specific websites and forums related to my interests. Some of those communities are harder to find and have less content though.

There’s a middle ground between Lemmy and Reddit that doesn’t yet exist. The hope (I think) is that the infrastructure will mimic the best of Reddit while rejecting the worst of Reddit.

I was complaining about the Reddit echo chamber for probably close to ten years. The arrows have not been used as designed for a long time. They’re supposed to mark an item as relevant or not relevant, not as a like or dislike. Had they been used properly… well, let’s put it this way, AI is now being trained based on what people like, not based on what information is relevant or correct.

Incidentally, I was brought to Lemmy for a reason similar to you. I posted one innocuous question on one sub that got me banned from a totally unrelated sub where I wasn’t even a member (evidently, engaging with one sub, regardless of your reasons or opinions, is enough for another sub to ban you, even if you fully support the other sub).

Sadly, it's a worse echo chamber. In my experience mods are far more likely to wield power like little dictators and ban for good faith dissent, as there's no governing body above them to prevent this. I've been banned for being pro-Israel by several such petty tyrants.

Upvotes and downvotes are generally per-server though. It's interesting to see how posts and submissions are regarded on other instances.

Welcome!

I also moved over from Reddit, some time ago now, Lemmy is great if you don’t mind it being quieter and you’re not into super niche things.

If you are into super niche things, definitely make those communities and begin fostering growth by posting, it’s what I’m doing for my home country of Wales, slow but steady and all that.

Hope you enjoy Lemmy!

I've been discussing this on Mastodon too, but more focused on features and limitations related to federation rather than people being dumber in one place or the other. But I also want more open conversations, which is one of the things I believe ActivityPub helps with.
So instead of voting for Lemmy I'll go ahead and say I prefer Kbin since I've found it easier here to interact with posts from other fediverse platforms.
Just read carefully the rules of each group/magazine/community as everyone is free to tidy up their spaces as they wish, reasonably or not.

Lemmy is good but very, very small in comparison to Reddit.

For example, /r/mildyinteresting has 286k subscribers. Lemmy has around 51k active users across the entire platform and all of it’s communities. And /r/mildyinteresting is a misspelling of the even more popular /r/mildlyinteresting (23.4 million subscribers).

Even some of the niche gaming communities are larger on Reddit (/r/Kenshi, 145k; /r/factorio, 370k).

However, the small community feel is much more pronounced here on the federated Lemmy servers. You’ll see the same names pop up so everyone isn’t a complete stranger. Third party app support is miles ahead of Reddit’s crappy app. And if you don’t like your instance for any reason you can hop to another one easily.

You’ll see certain trends on trending communities here. There’s a lot more posts on Linux, Star Trek, and Tech news that isn’t as pronounced on Reddit unless you subscribe specifically to them. The meme community is top notch though and doesn’t have the incel and misogyny issues that plague Reddit.

Lemmy is smaller and more… particular. Users here are more respectful, and more sensitive. Politics seem to bleed into everything more than at reddit. Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber, but of a different flavor. More “kill the rich” and less " the narwhal bacon’s at midnight"

You can still get nuked arbitrarily for annoying a mod.

I say try it out, but use the ban tool liberally the first few weeks. Block instances like hexbear, lemmygrad and possibly ml if you aren’t interested in leftist discussion, and in for former instance’s cases, trolling and dogpilling. (Or keep em, if you like that 😁)

After a few weeks of banning users and instances I have a generally palatable but still pretty left leaning time-dump / memefeed.

It’s the best I’ve found, but I wouldn’t call it a “good” alternative myself no.

Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I’ll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There’s a plethora of topics that aren’t even worth trying to discuss here because if you try to introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you’ll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don’t mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can’t fucking stand ads so hey sure it’s worth the monthly payment to me. I’m a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you’ll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you’re propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

There’s other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he’s still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that’s primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we’re missing a lot of middleground opinions shared. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

There are absolutely exceptions, but that’s the trend I perceive here.

Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber

Lemmy is a way bigger echo chamber, it’s as “not matter who vote blue” as it gets tbh (with very few exceptions).

Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?

Nope, it’s the opposite if anything.
I’m constantly getting attacked with ad hominem (my favourite one - getting called a fascist) here despite voicing opinions as respectfully as it gets, as well as providing sources for my claims whenever people ask.
Gotta have really thick skin if you not left-leaning, but otherwise - you will feel right at home :)