Commenting in Reddit felt very claustrophobic in a way. And saturated. Kind of sad, also, if you were some days late to some nice topic, and get buried under thousands and thousands of comments made prior yours, and have zero interactions at that point from anyone, even if you asked a very relevant question or whatever.
But I suspect Lemmy will get to that point too. Right now, though, it’s light enough to actually warrant wasting energy writing anything as a response to anything.
There will always be new and smaller instances tho. Like it was true for smaller communities in reddit. It's all good and well until they get exceedingly popular and a shitshow.
I get more responses here than I ever did at Reddit. Like you can engaged in a conversation, not just try to figure out the stupidest thing to say to get the most votes and making sure you post at like, 4am for maximum exposure
The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it's very easy to consume content
The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there's a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it's a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That's understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.
One thing I’ve noticed I always do, is I’ll play a game, then hop on the subreddit for that game once I can no longer be spoiled. It’s nice to have a community with years of content and information waiting for you.
But the communities are gradually being formed here too, literally before our eyes. Someone just made a dragon’s dogma community like an hour ago for example. I’m happy to give them time to grow, and to help them along myself.
But hopefully communities everywhere will increasingly recognize the importance of having well organized, dedicated wikis, rather than trying to stuff everything into an existing forum community or into a Discord.
Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it's resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I'm so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.
In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.