Plenty of people don’t like it, and plenty of them block it all out… but love it or hate it there is a lot of communist and anarchist discussion here. I was on Reddit for a long time and never found so many people interested in leftist discourse so far outside of the liberal mainstream.

Oh, hell yeah.

The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.

The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.

Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.

Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.

I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.

That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.

The flashlight community is lit

Most people still on Reddit are bad people. Idk if it would be helpful to lure them over.

I for one, unsubscribe from communities that copy and dump content from someplace else. I found they’re low engagement anyways. But there are plenty good ones. Idk what to recommend because I don’t know other people’s interests and spoken languages.

(It might be a different story for meme pictures, since they’re usually circulated and regurgitated. That happens on other platforms as well.)

There’s a much higher ratio of real humans to bots in most Lemmy communities.

For technology, sexuality, and socio-politico-economic discussion it’s as if Lemmy “stole” the users most the most developed perspectives.

However, all the problems are still present. Users still perpetually struggle to discern their right from left. And, there’s certainly at least a few mainstream mods that’ve their self-worth entirely contingent upon others agreeing with them.

I think one of the few things Lemmy is better at is that I can go into 8hr old thread with 120 replies and write a comment and then have people actually read that comment too and react to it.

With 99% of AskReddit threads for example, posting a reply was complete waste of time unless you were among the first ones in. Almost all of the top comments were always also among the first comments.

I like that on Lemmy there are more human-like posts and no advertisements. Hated scrolling through Reddit ads then getting sneaky ad-like posts from ‘people.’

Smaller community but still decent throughput

And if you’re into it, everyone is a leftist.

I also think that if you want to build your own community it’s easier in Lemmy than Reddit

I’m a big believer in the Pareto Principle where 20% of the users are responsible for 80% of the content.

Lemmy is Reddit’s Top 20%.

For me, it’s not about having good content that is not on reddit, but avoiding all kinds of bad content that is on reddit. I can scroll through the “top of the day” list of my subscriptions in a relatively short time and find many posts that I enjoy or that interest me. When I used reddit, there was always so much noise, ragebait, clickbait, sometimes interesting questions with only bland answers, etc.

Cue the obama giving himself a medal meme but the comments are much more intelligent and there’s a much better conversation to be had

One thing it doesn’t is fucking ads that are the majority of the content on bullshit like instagram

Piracy, Linux, Self-Hosting, Anarchism

For me, more real users.

I mean, I don’t think lemmy has 0% bots, but its probably much harder with manual application approvals.

Also, Federation makes censorship harder, but also allows defederation to stop bigotry.