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“All” here vs other social media is much better

It’s more likely that arguments are civil. There are still quite a few venomous arguments but I’ve noticed that it it proportionally less.

On Reddit or Facebook, if you didn’t like a group you left and made your own. If you didn’t like the admins, tough shit. Here, if you don’t like the admins, you can use a different instance.

Likes and dislikes are separate, and are in some cases viewable who submit them. I feel like this keeps people a little more honest.

I like the modlog and transparency. It’s so much easier that when someone complains about unfair mod action, to see if they are in the right or exaggerating.

There is an “end” to Lemmy. There isn’t just infinite content to scroll through.

Dislike

Smaller user base means that niches that Reddit filled just aren’t here.

There is an “end” to Lemmy. There isn’t just infinite content to scroll through.

Neutral

The types of common negative personalities here are different from that of Reddit. Reddit has more misogyny, classism, antinatalists, and obnoxious atheists. (As opposed to the chill atheists.) Lemmy has quite a few people that are pretty shitty to those that are disabled or cannot get out of some situations. If you cannot work towards the greater good without any rest, can’t escape a bad situation, or can’t just extend yourself further, you are trash. There are also more fringe beliefs here. I do like it because of the different perspectives, even if I very strongly disagree. (It makes me think!) Unfortunately we still have the dumbass arguments about generations but you can’t have it all.

Decentrilization is both a blessing and a curse.

If there’s an issue you can make your own community with blackjack, and hookers.

But at the same time these communities never seem to get super big (minus a few) and if you’re subscribed to both there’s not a good way to deduplicate the posts. So 5 communities post the same thing (or one person posts them in 5) sometimes you see all 5 side by side.

Like: decentralization and a renaissance of the old- school dream of what the Internet should be.

Dislike: media bias fact checker bot spamming every damn post. Power tripping mods.

Dislike: Tankies.

Dislike: there is still no way to group communities into sub feeds, apart from subs, local, all. (and the work around some do of having multiple accounts seems silly to me)

Some people here take themselves way too seriously. Not every conversation needs to be an argument.

The userbase is overall more mature and can actually discuss complex topics. Different instances have completely different feels, vibes, cultures and userbases, and that’s amazing. Some admin teams are spez wannabees but the federated structure limits the damage that they can cause.

Relative lack of niche communities. Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.

Like:

• It has that small-community feel still. I don’t see (perhaps because I stay out of a lot of the more tech-ey communities?) the kind of farming, low-effort, generally mediocre content I saw on Reddit.
• Lack of the sense of a hyper-corporatized, “You’re only allowed to do things that make us money” sense that’s enshittified much of the internet lately. I’m not even sure if Lemmy can be monetized.

Dislike:

• Not yet large enough either. I don’t want hundreds of millions of users, but I still miss a lot of the more niche hobby/discussion communities I used to be able to participate in. Even communities for fairly large hobbies or interests can be dead on Lemmy.
• The awful political takes. Everything from typical dumbness up to advocating violence (but it’s okay because it’s my point). And it’s everywhere.

The 14 year olds with “big brain” takes.

Like:

• Decentralized system that limits abuse

• Great customizaion

• It works (unlike much of the competition)

Dislike:

• Lack of even remotely niche content (aside from Linux and infosec content)

• Generally very pessimistic userbase

• Lacks polish and features in many areas

• Currently trends towards extremist echo chambers - the fact that .ml (an instance known for banning criticism of violent, racist, authoritarian governments) is one of the biggest instances, is a good example of this.

• tends to be extremely hostile to any sort of monitization, regardless of the quality or cost to produce content

I genuinely cannot express how much it annoys me that I cannot have a blocklist for keywords.

Most of the things I read are from my subscribed communities, which i’m very happy about generally, however given the overall state of life today, half of the posts in completely unrelated communities end up being one of the following:

• Twitter CEO
• Hate speech in US politics
• AI propaganda for some pump and dump quick money

I really just don’t want to see any of those things

I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example.

I don’t like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation. The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years. This Lemmy account has only been around for about 1/10th of that.

One of the biggest strengths of Lemmy is also one of its biggest curses. Due to its federated nature, anyone can create a new instance. The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don’t like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc. They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically.

Dislike: the daily post from someone asking where they can find “non-political” or “centrist” communities, which is a dog whistle that they’re tired of being yelled at for their shitty views

The thing I dislike the most is that my bot got banned. I made a bot to post carefully categorized articles into their proper communities, but it was banned without warning or explanation. All the communities I was modding dried up shortly thereafter because I didn’t manually post in them instead.

The people. For both.