No intrusive ads or trackers. Less AI slop and more genuine human interaction. The ability to easily block communities, users, and instances is nice too.
All this plus no profile karma. Meaning instead of chasing numbers to inflate our accounts and increase our perceived worth (whether consciously or subconsciously), people just are.
I feel like this will be inevitable with growth. Unless we get to foster a consciousness about its problems and get instances to actively prevent those
I genuinely feel different writing here. On Reddit I constantly analyzed the 18 different ways some random person would take my comment badly. Now I just write stuff and people don't instantly assume I'm an evil moron.
I like how open the ecosystem is. You can pick any instance, any web app, any mobile app, block instances you don't want to see, etc. You have much more control over what you see and how you interact with the system.
The subscribed feed doesn’t contain uninvited random junk. I guess irrelevant trash drives engagement among some people, but it’s just driving me mad instead.
Lemmy is still wild and untamed, like Reddit used to be.
I share what you like (smaller, more intimate) along with the absence of ads, and the more original content over just cutting and pasting that I find in other equivalent large-scale boards.
There are some things I've grown to like. I feel better represented by my choice of instance. I could self host my own, but don't really want to incur that maintenance. I do like that if my instance were to do something I disagree with, I don't have to leave the community as a whole like I did with Reddit, and should instead find a new home.
I also kind that it's easier to filter out the personalities that bother me, since they tend to flock to specific instances. I still have to contend with them occasionally, but that's no different than Reddit, but less often.
Most of my interactions here have been with reasonable people, even when we disagreed. It does feel a little quiet at times, but that's ok.
I like the tone and feel here as of yet. People are more friendly, interactions are more pleasant and it feels easier to participate. A higher proportion of comments are worthwhile to read and/or engage with. It's still small enough that you'll have your post or comment seen by people instead of being immediately drowned out by one liners and karma farming injokes.
It's also still got that homely feeling where it's small enough that you start recognising usernames, which makes the community feel a bit more closely knit. Sometimes even perhaps being recognised yourself, which makes you feel more like part of a community rather than a faceless Redditor screaming into the void.
Honestly, I like that it's Reddit-like. Minus admins slapping [removed by Reddit] onto things and minus the kinds of moderators that make your comments disappear without notice.
Personally, I wish there were more people here though. Maybe it's great if your jam is memes and politics and nothing else but I miss the discussions everywhere from Reddit. The not dead communities. Being able to visit the Harley Quinn subreddit in between seasons to still get your fix of silly memes and discussions and newcomers giving their reviews, just as a wild example. Having alternative style communities that are for more than just posting Spotify links to songs. Having more options in general so that if the one community around dealing with a thing that you're actually interested in turns out to be not on the level, there's another 5 at least to choose from.
Also, I liked being able to disappear into the crowd on Reddit. Here, I often feel more like deleting something I've posted a couple of days later because I feel like I stick out more here
Personally I'm not that interested in the technical aspects. I just want a Reddit-like platform to interact with my interests, learn from people, mingle with people from different walks of life to me and expand my mind. The federation thing is a bonus but not what I'm actually here for.
And it wasn't just ongoing stuff but pretty much anything you could think of, including some obscure '90s series that you never even see anyone mention, there'll be an active subreddit for that. Same goes for individual bands or artists as well.
Like, I totally get what people are saying when they say they like it smaller than Reddit here. I actually agree to an extent because even Reddit was better in a lot of ways 10 years ago when Spez wasn't trying to be the next Zuck.
But I do still think it could do with more users than it has now for a lot of reasons. Enough users for there to be a little more variety and choice than there is right now.
I can understand where they're coming from though. It's nostalgia for the days when forums and MySpace were 'social media' and things were simpler and we actually built camaraderie in online spaces, instead of everyone just trying to be heard in the noise.
But I mean, you can still get that in individual communities, actually. Even on Reddit, you could expect to be lost in the crowd in places like AskReddit but there's definitely niche spaces with few enough people for it to feel like the old days and actually make friends if that's what you're after.
I like that it's smaller. I usually sort top of 6 or 12 hours (also something you can't do on reddit) and eventually I start scrolling so far that I've basically run out of posts to see, which helps stop me from doomscrolling
I like the lack of downvotes on blahaj. It helped me break the karma-dopamine loop of Reddit, while still giving the satisfaction of socializing on a board.
A lot less mod power trips, willful misinterpretations, rage-baiting, and neurotic narcissists on the verge of episodic breakdowns.
I do wish Lemmy felt more than just an online repository, though. I don't know how to get to know anyone since there haven't been many things relevant to me.
It’s decentralised. Decentralisation just makes sense for something that requires hosting a lot of data and using a lot of bandwidth, less load on the servers and such. Insane how YouTube was able to survive so long before Google bought them.