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.

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

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.

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

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.

Not really.

but without the politics and without being overly-policed

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

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 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

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 reasonably 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.

Also, here I can say that I don't give two shits about neither Zelda nor Link, without fear of backlash. At least yhe contemporary games - Everything since Link II for NES has been kinda meh in my book.

And if you want to filter out politics, blocking lemmygrad takes away most of the tankie-spam.

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 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.

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.