I generally prefer Lemmy to Reddit, although I do miss being able to find niche communities that are both populated and active. Smaller communities tend to become ghost towns around here, unfortunately.
Lemmy seems a lot less toxic than Reddit. Every now and then I see comments here of people that are assholes, but its not the norm. Whenever I would check the comment feeds in Reddit, so many of them devolve into petty bickering. It seemed like a quarter of the user base set out that day to either be pissed off, or to piss someone else off.
Reddit by far was a better experience; more content, better moderation, less negativity.
I’m still here on Lemmy, though, in hope of it getting better (and it definitely scratches the same itch as Reddit without the corporate arrogance).
That said, even though it annoys me, I do find myself getting exposed to a wider array of opinions on Lemmy that I just never saw on Reddit. And while I disagree with a lot of it it’s probably healthier for things to be that way. The tankies, though … so many tankies.
Obviously, the difficulty with very niche communities not being useful here can be annoying.
And, being real, the lack of robust moderation tools makes moderating a pain in the ass.
But, overall, I find the people on lemmy less prone to bad behavior, and the discussions more rewarding. That makes up for the underlying missing functional things worth it.
Reddit, even before they went full asshole as a company, had the major problem of being big. Humans are assholes for the most part. The more people you have, and the lower the bar for entry, the more of those assholes are going to be a problem.
Lemmy has assholes too. The usual knee jerk reactionaries, trolls, and that sort of thing. But the very minor extra effort of having to pick an instance reduces how many of the brain dead assholes will put in the effort. The assholes are a better quality of asshole lol.
But damn, there were some long established communities on reddit that simply can't be reproduced here because you can't make old communities. There are a ton of subs that had been around since subs came around. You can't duplicate that kind of organic growth. There's very few C/s on lemmy that have a real sense of community yet. I think it'll happen, but it hasn't had time for a lot of real cultures to spring up the way reddit had.
I miss the hell out of those long established neighborhoods.
After almost a year of being Reddit free, I have been peeking back in there lately. It just doesn’t hit the same but I do lurk in some subs just because of the volume of content.
I do enjoy Lemmy though. I don’t feel as intimidated to make comments and like to feel we’re building something from the grass roots here.
I avoid reddit out of principle even though I would prefer it. It's only going down hill from here on out and they've neglected their app so much it's too painful to attempt to use it.
My main reasoning is content and sometimes the comments. Content here is a bit slow but a lot commenters are kind of a-holes and painfully obnoxious. Especially from lemmy.ml, always a little anxious when I comment.
I much prefer Lemmy, when RIF shut down I migrated and never looked back. Lemmy isn't as crowded as Reddit became and reminds me of how Reddit used to look and feel.
I also signed up to Mastodon and between the two (Lemmy and Mastodon) get all the information and entertainment I ever got from Reddit without all the dickheads that now populate Reddit.
I do prefer the size of Reddit, but I am continuing the API changes protest. Sup, that's it. If they reverse it, I might return, although the UI has changed again. Wouldn't mean I'd leave Lemmy, just use both.
I haven't actually used it with 3rd party apps, I used to do the same as I am doing right now, desktop website on my phone, but I do support the protests and I am not giving up after 2 days.
Reddit continuously grew more toxic with astroturfers, bots, and other bad-faith actors after the protest. I deleted all of my accounts the day they went public since that was the previously planned line-in-the-sand for me. I only visit periodically every few days to check my local towns subreddit for news. It would be nice to have a bigger community with Lemmy but I certainly don't miss the constant arguments.
I haven't looked back. fuck reddit. fuck spez. fuck their whole puke filled world that was built on the backs of nice internet people that they turned into a profit rearing meatlocker of piss and complaints, still peppered with shitty, out of date memes.
actually engaging with content (commenting/posting/voting) instead of simply consuming. By the time the API restrictions came around and the ads/bots started to dominate, it felt pointless to engage on Reddit any more.
the positive parts of the federated and FOSS nature. Choose an instance, build your own, use or build any client you want to, federate or defederate whoever you want.
I prefer Reddit for:
getting info/recommendations on things. The knowledge base is magnitudes larger than anything Lemmy can offer atm. Also, due to the centralized nature, it's so much easier to search for something on Reddit.
Lemmy's got some problems and I can't stand the interinstance drama, also, due to the decentralized nature, some instances can't keep up or the admins don't care any more, so whole communities can essentially be held hostage or simply die until a toolset to move a community from one instance to another (and propagate the change properly to the Fediverse) becomes available.
We have far better discussions on Lemmy, but there are some really niche communities I follow on Reddit still because there aren't enough interested folks here on Lemmy.
Honestly, at this point I kinda prefer to go on Reddit. I'm getting tired of all the tech/FOSS talk and there's so much doom and gloom on here it just bums me out.
Honestly I'm engaging more on lemmy in comments but if you manage to create a nice list of fun subs to follow on reddit a lot of complaints about bots and stuff are less problematic. Then again I also follow some Dutch subs and they seem to have less bots with the language barrier and all.
Lemmy does seem to be more negative though. A lot of doom and gloom here. I'm not really into Linux but I'll admit that windows and Microsoft ain't great. However the amount of complaining about how shit Microsoft is on stead of being enthusiastic about Linux baffles me. And you see these things in other communities too. The reddit helldivers community seems to be a bunch of memes and the lemmy oke a bunch of complaints.
Then again my comments seem to actually reach people on Lemmy so I am more active here.
Lemmy is better, but the communities I care the most about and want to give the most to aren't on lemmy, so I don't really have the luxury of using it quite as much as I'd like. I do like it here, though
Reddit for sure. But I absolutely refuse to use their app so I use it in the web browser but not a lot because reddit sucks on mobile.
So I mostly use Lemmy on my phone.
Lemmy, reddit is more active and has more content but Lemmy will get there. The front page is awful now. It's full of ads and suggested crap. I subscribed to things for a reason. I liked seeing posts I cared about. This shoving content down my throat approach curiously made me get off the site sooner.
Reddit definitely has more users and more communities that don't exist here but I prefer lemmy because no ads and no corporation trying to sell my data
Still stuck between both, but when I’m on reddit I’m using a sideloaded version of Apollo with my own API key while logged out, so theoretically they can’t actually collect any data.
Reddit is obviously more active, even though a huge chunk of that activity is bots, but I like it here better. My only complaint is that my home page is weird sometimes and doesn’t show posts newer than a day or two.
I deleted 2 Reddit account with over 10M combined karma during the shit show last year. Have never gone back. Lemmy is a million times better, even if I'm missing some of my local communities.
I like Lemmy more. I visit 4 subs on Reddit, not daily. I think it doesn’t have to be an either/or necessarily. I refuse to use their app. Rip baconreader.
Reddit was realy god in my local areal, so thats what immissinhg. Lemmy,isnt just there yet. Not many from my area. So yir i like Lemmy for the lack of adds, and for notsellinhg my data
I use both but I'll ditch reddit as soon as I can't patch apps like Infinity with my own api key. Reddits more active but it's also horrible to use if you don't jump through hoop.
By now, Lemmy, hands down. I do sometimes end up on reddit from searching for stuff, and I check every now and then if I got any messages on my old accounts just in case someone wants to reach out, but overall - even without niche communities, Lemmy is just the better experience for me, personally.
Ive been enjoying Lemmy again after uninstalling reddit after growing tired of seeing nothing but bad news in my feed (probably something I could fix but at the same time I was supposed to have left the site anyways), reddit still has the edge in content but Lemmy is still a good time killer for me.
I hate reddit but I was forced to go there since I apparently have nice interested, but they started going private and now I just use reddit for porn curation