I feel like it's pretty similar but the low population makes it easier to spot repeat posters. Also I feel like the quality of answers tend to better (lengthier, more thought out, e.t.c)
Solely from the parts of the lemmyverse I frequent, yes definitely. People would think you're quite silly if you talked like a redditor, even if they were too polite to openly mock you for it.
Reddit has a bunch of "call-and-response" sort of trigger words and phrases, along with canned responses to a situation, repeated in-jokes, etc which made a lot of the site feel bloated and samey. Definitely the comments are much sparser here but there's none of that. Anytime I Google something and check a reddit thread for answers, I'm shocked at how easily any thread can turn into some blown up debate about something stupid. In general that doesn't happen here.
On the other hand, this is a pretty leftists-only echo chamber which narrows perspective. I went to the no kings protest today. If you believe Lemmy, I should have brought thrifted clothes, a 3M respirator, milk of magnesia, a first aid kit, heat resistant gloves, etc. really what I needed was an energy drink because I got tired. Lemmy can get pretty up it's own ass about the aesthetics of revolution.
Once in a blue moon there will be a Reddit-style comment chain on Lemmy, I can tolerate it occasionally when the situation warrants it. When I left Reddit, I was getting tired of every top thread having at least one of the same joke template replies and I'm sure it hasn't gotten any better since.
Lemmy's issues are with leftist vs. liberal infighting I would say.
Preparing for the worst is not a bad idea. If the situation turned sour, I'd love to be in a big group of people prepared for that. But if I did show up like that, I would've been 1 of a small handful with that level of preparedness. It wouldn't have mattered. By far, the most important thing for these protests to be successful is for people to show up in huge numbers. If people feel like they need to be ready for war, they won't show up and the protest won't be as impactful. I'd rather have 10s of thousands showing up in funny costumes carrying instruments and noisemakers than a couple hundred with gas masks.
Every subreddit has its own vibe. Some have fully transitioned here like linux and some of the meme sharing communities. Many have not. I cannot really think of communities on Lemmy that do not exist on Reddit.
Since lemmy in specific was meant to be reddit with less overt rejection of left wing subject matter, there's so many similarities that they're going to have a lot of overlap in the kinds of people that want to use them.
Then, since lemmy was initially populated by ex reddit users, you run into the foundational culture being essentially the same. Each wave of r/efugees after that causes a fresh mixing, followed by some of those leaving and the rest adapting more towards lemmy culture norms.
The lack of ability to just r/ random words helps weed out low effort shit like woosh and thathappned. So you already have a discernable decrease in empty headed snark. There's still plenty of it, and lemmy has its own population of assholes that snark in a different way.
I’ve found that people actually have civil conversations here. Someone states a fact, another person asks for backup, it’s provided and the person says thanks I didn’t know that. Yeah there are less people here but I would take quality over quantity any day.
References and phrases don't make a culture. The words may change, but the culture here is absolutely the same as Reddit. Which is why it's so damned cringe when you see someone on Lemmy offer a smug, self-satisfied criticism of some supposed inferiority in the Reddit userbase. That kind of smugness is peak Reddit-culture.