For me, it’s a few things.

  1. A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush.

  2. Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking.

  3. Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.

    • mcpheeandme@lemmy.worldOP
      39·
      1 year ago

      Same here! Crossing my fingers hard and commenting and posting way more than I did for years on Reddit.

      • Black Xanthus@lemmy.world
        13·
        1 year ago

        I have to say that I totally agree with the notion of looking for something that isn’t. ‘digital sugar rush’.

        I enjoyed the deeper and harder discussions around politics, theology and philosophy. However, I only ever posted when I had something to add to the conversation as a lot of the subs I was in were modded by experts, and I’m at best an interested layperson.

        I think for the moment at least, I need to brave commenting more. I guess we will have to so is we can attract the same experts to this platform, and get the same level of discussion.

      • TIB3R@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        1 year ago

        I think I need to find communities that were closer to what I subbed on reddit before I post. I mostly liked meme subs and a lot of the main communities aren’t fragmented enough yet for me to post memes on specific shoes/movies/gnaew I like yet. But I’ve been commenting a lot! ✊🏾

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
          6·
          1 year ago

          It’s going to take time. Reddit took many years to develop that level of niche communities. We’ve got a really nice surge of momentum right now, so it makes it easier to keep commenting when everything is exciting and growing. But when we do have a lull in activity, try to keep that same energy and stay active. I’m also commenting like 10x more than I used to in Reddit.

          It’s important to enjoy the journey, right now we still don’t have many of the communities we were used to on Reddit, but we do have an environment that is way more positive and hopeful than the jaded feeling of Reddit in 2023. I’m trying not to worry about the niche communities too much and just enjoy the things I couldn’t do on reddit, like poke my head into a wide variety of groups and be welcomed in by other users who are happy to engage. On reddit people were much more hostile to each other by default. As long as we maintain these positive vibes, the communities will organically grow back over time.

    • TummyDrums@lemmy.world
      17·
      1 year ago

      This so much. And if you’re thinking of starting a new hobby, there is a sub for it to help you get started. Not only do you have a group of veterans to ask your newb questions to, but lots of them have curated FAQs and starter guides to get you rolling. Reddit honestly improved my life in many ways for this reason.

    • socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works
      16·
      1 year ago

      Hobbies are really the thing. And a source for funny videos. I don’t need the big subreddits for politics and news, much as I tend to get sucked into them, but I do really like having a wide range of subforums for my niche interests. It’s much easier to find someone to talk to about a small tabletop RPG on a large aggregate site than it is to search for sufficiently active independent forums.

  • Raf@lemmy.world
    76·
    1 year ago

    Advice on choosing between two things that are only marginally different.

  • w00master@lemmy.world
    68·
    1 year ago

    Product reviews, restaurant recommendations (regional searches on Reddit for Vacationing/etc was awesome), tourist recommendations - this was the truly useful part of Reddit that will take Lemmy a very long time to catch up to.

    • Mithos@lemmy.world
      22·
      1 year ago

      I’ll second this one. All the niche communities made me feel like I was connected to the world around me in really organic way. I wasn’t being advertised at, I was experiencing life alongside other people with my shared interests.

  • hatter@lemmy.world
    53·
    1 year ago

    The smaller communities for specific interests (music genres, hobbies, etc).

    Reviews and opinions. With Google results becoming worse by the hour, fake reviews flooding Amazon, paid reviews in almost every site/blog, when I’m about to purchase something I’m not 100% sure about I just search reddit to see what actual people are saying about it.

    And last but not least - mostly sane discussions for news/articles with nested comments and a voting system. Lemmy already offers everything needed for that, what remains to be seen is how the community develops and grows.

  • UnspecificGravity@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 year ago

    A massive search engine registered database containing years of knowledge from millions of people. Its going to be hard to replicate that.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      9·
      1 year ago

      Unless we copy it onto here.

      So this is the third time I’ve brought that up. I should probably specify I’m willing to do all the necessary work myself, I just don’t have any money for it.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
          16·
          1 year ago

          So, there’s people that have used the Reddit API to make basically a backup of it. If you could get a copy of that, you could very likely translate it into something Lemmy can read. Then, you go somewhere with protective laws in case Reddit gets involved and set up a special instance that just serves old Reddit content.

          Afterwards, to re-use an example from one of my earlier comments here, you could seamlessly go to !SpeculateEvolution@fediverseredditclone.ru and see u/CanadaPlus101’s post about metal and aquatic aliens.

  • AnonTwo@lemmy.world
    25·
    1 year ago

    Mainly news. Not just world/region but hobby news.

    So far just the world/region news is here, which aren’t particularly great discussions if you’re trying not to get hotheaded.

    • Limeey@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      I liked using r/all to kinda keep tabs on what news what getting lots of attention. I don’t want “all news” - that’ll just upset me. But the big stories rising to the top from the hivemind were helpful

  • spleenfiesta@feddit.de
    21·
    1 year ago

    I was mostly on reddit for the information I got from the niche communities I joined. Posts regarding GPU passthrough for virtual machines, the configurations people used, problem solving for those virtual machines, I loved all of it. I only lurked though, very very rarely did I even comment, on here I’m trying to be more active. I’m hoping that as communities grow, I can get the same information I got from the reddit subs I lurked on

    • mcpheeandme@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Your last couple of sentences resonate deeply. I was active like a decade ago. I remained active mostly in one sub, but only occasionally.

      Here, it feels like I have to do my part.

  • namhi@sh.itjust.works
    20·
    1 year ago

    Reddit was nice because I could Google something like “best beginner DSLR camera” and I only got ai generated articles on the newest most expensive cameras, but I could search “best beginner DSLR camera reddit” and actually get good options.

    • Limeey@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 year ago

      part of that is just that reddit was around for so long and had such good SEO. I doubt any lemmy community will achieve that level of SEO so it won’t be that easy. But if lemmy can just get a search bar that isn’t a piece of shit then do we really need google?

      • godofpainTR@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        What if you write, for example, “search term site:reddit.com” ? The SEO wouldn’t really matter then, would it?

  • JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee
    19·
    1 year ago

    Reddit was my biggest source of news. Not just because it was usually pretty up to date, but I greatly appreciated being able to check the comments as a bullshit detector. That and the article being in the comments instead of news sites’ paywalls.

  • C. Jonah
    19·
    1 year ago

    I’ll co-sign all of that! Niche stuff is why I was on Reddit.

    Fitness for FTM guys, my city’s local page, subs for my dogs’ specific breeds, Jewish cooking. The communities that grew organically in n niche spots brought me a lot of joy.

    Also hey! Kayaking! If you know of a Lemmy community for it, I’m game! Always nice to run into other paddlers.

    • mcpheeandme@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s great stuff! I really hope we can build Lemmy up so that it scratches our niche itch.

      There’s an unpopulated kayaking sub I found yesterday: https://lemmy.ml/c/kayaking (Not sure if I’m sharing that link correctly or in a way that makes it easy to navigate.)

      I posted a photo yesterday. Would be awesome to help get it off the ground!

    • Andreas@feddit.dk
      2·
      1 year ago

      Seconding FTMFitness, but Lemmy doesn’t have an active general fitness community yet, and getting the average trans guy to stop using centralized platforms is like pulling teeth because the knowledge of technology and privacy among trans men is dismal. I gave up on seeing trans men in FOSS and the decentralized web at any large scale after seeing how many of them chose to keep using Twitter despite the Elon Musk protests because the Fediverse is scary.

    • tovi@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Have you found a Jewish cooking niche here yet? Because I would absolutely be into that! I’m not good at cooking, but one of the few exceptions to that is that I make fantastic challah, and I’m always up for sharing that.

  • modifier@lemmy.ca
    18·
    1 year ago

    • Distraction

    • Discussion

    What was good about reddit is that the front page could be interacted with as a quick way to burn some downtime and distract your eyeballs with cute cats or “holdmy____”, or it could be interacted with as a series of rabbit holes that could easily eat up hours of time.

    Beyond interacting with content, the discussion around the content was the thing that kept me coming back for 10 years, even after I abandoned Twitter and Facebook years ago.

    So far, the fediverse seems like a throwback and an innovation at the same time, and I mean that in the best possible sense.

  • paco@fedia.io
    16·
    1 year ago

    I am looking for curation and durable content here.

    For me, Reddit was a curated source of information. You have these communities full of knowledgeable people. If you went into that community you’d either find the info you need, already asked and answered, or you could ask and get a good answer. Discord is just real-time chat. It has virtually no search engine find-ability, no categorising, tagging, or reasonable way to go back and find something someone asked a year ago that was answered perfectly. Many of the social media are really personal and ‘now’ oriented. I’m eating a donut. This person pissed me off. I’m getting married, etc. Video streaming platforms have individual creators, who often have a theme, but they don’t have communities or top-down categorisation. And video sucks as a searchable archive. It’s really hard to know that 17 minutes into this video with a clickbait title, there’s a really useful nugget of information. But Reddit (and now its federated clones) is user-curated and categorised. If I jump into a Windows-oriented community, I won’t find a bunch of Linux stuff. If I want to look at a sport or a hobby or politics, there’s a place to go. But it’s not one creator/curator. It’s organic.

    • chksome@fedia.io
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yes. I like Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly as you described. I got real value out of it, and I hope that something coalesces to take its place.