IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It's shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don't really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.

I was on reddit a couple times past couple of days for some specific purposes (like looking up Minecraft seeds). Checked the front page and stuff out of curiosity and I genuinely don't know if the content was already as bad when I left or if Lemmy just gave me new standards or something, but Jesus Christ. It's all just ragebait and TikTok reposts, even though everyone on reddit always claims to hate TikTok. It's like if you collected all the lowest tier posts from every other site and then gathered them in one.

Exactly how I felt there too. Reddit was different. It wasn't the place where you could come and chat with strangers about things you enjoy, even the most positive subs were littered with spam and comments usually devolved into arguments.

Not saying it didn't happen here but the vibe is for sure better. Haven't logged into my reddit account since spez killed Sync.

Fellow Digg exile, previous Fark, previous Slashdot, etc.

I still go back to Reddit for several niche groups that just don't have enough users to transition - would likely disappear if people moved elsewhere (Lemmy or Discord)

Yea I remember it went to shit around 2018 or somewhere there about. I had been hoping for a viable alternative for a while. I should thank Spez in retrospect.

Wasn't Digg 2.0 the time of the Great Exodus? Or has my memory of these arcane events become clouded throughout the eons of enshittification?

Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.

Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn't really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.

Lenmy is brilliant as platform and concept, but the truth is it simply can't compare to Reddit where there are 1000x more user and 100x more comments/activity.

Maybe I am part of that new group? I'm just here for the memes. Lemmy is amusement for me and a way to kill some time. If I want to have deep or meaningful discussions I'll talk to people I actually know (and then I'll also know I'm not wasting my time arguing with a troll). The "casual browsing" content is also lower quality here than on Reddit, but I can't complain, because I don't really contribute, I just lurk.

Reddit also gets a little bit worse every spike, too. There are few mods remaining on Reddit who are doing anything more interesting for their communities than basic spam removal. Automod does all the work when all the largest subs just repost the same content and fake stories anyway.

It's not like going to implode or anything anytime soon but the quality (from my perspective at least) has totally flatlined since June because why would anyone in their right mind invest creative energy into cultivating a unique community? I think that eventually a Lemmy community will pop up that simply couldn't exist on Reddit and will serve to illustrate why I believe this model is better.

Another hurdle is getting game devs to treat Lemmy instances for their games as official points of contact, which is definitely something reddit still has that Lemmy doesn't, unfortunately.

I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it'll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.

Seems like there's more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I've found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.

I like your optimism but theres not a lot of great examples of the little guys winning lately. I'm not sure exactly how, but I predict things end badly for Lemmy. Just seems like a more likely outcome in today's world. Guessing reddit does ok everyone just ends up a bit more miserable than before. Sorry for being a turd, I just think your prediction is statistically unlikely.

I have a similar experience, only visiting reddit for stuff like tech problems and very niche communities. I had never willingly visited the reddit homepage since.

There are a lot of posts now on lemmy compared to before the reddit fiasco but is not like the activity on reddit. The good thing though is that it made me stop my habit of mindlessly scrolling through endless content.

I dunno, I browse every 2 or so hours at work at while yeah I'll find some of the same stuff, the vast majority of my scrolling is new

Because everyone is only half in and going to Reddit still like crack addicts

I remember when there was a huge amount of complaints when Reddit updated and the top posts started cycling multiple times per day (or per hour) instead of hanging around most of the day

Try Kagi. I'm totally hooked. It's a refreshing search experience and you can rank reddit as a lower level site so it can still come up, but less likely to be at the top of your search list all the time.

I'm doing my part! insert starship troopers gif here idk im tech illiterate

If more subreddits moved over it might make people more willing to move over as well.

Well, a permaban was finally enough for me. Lemmy has a big disadvantage: the communities are quite small and some don't even exist

With the rate that Musk is destroying Twitter, Spez is surely going to have another grand fuckup soon.

I must confess that I after a few months installed the reddit app. I only go there once I read all content on lemmy but man I don't have a nsfw only filter anymore on reddit.

Reddit also had the ability to just type in my address bar "/r/obscurefandom" and be taken directly to the subreddit for it. Lemmy doesn't have those smaller subs yet and you have to hunt for the right instance if it does.

Whelp, better get to asking questions... Someone ask me a question to an answer someone may want to search for

Even then, Reddit has accumulated so much technical advice over the years, I hope I can still find archived posts this way, if ever it truly does crash and burn.

And Linux will dethrone windows.

I wish they were true but reality is that people will accept just about any and all abuse and stay with the crap despite sometimes getting angry about it.

Which is never going to happen because you can't click this /c/books

And fine an agglomeration of all /c/books on all lemmy servers Ina single location.

This cripples any network effect and any benefice of decentralization and federation

Are you saying anime is niche?

they may have won this battle but the war is still ongoing. reddit is a public company, and it is a modern website, which means it is going to get shittier and shittier and it is never going to stop. i still go there for sports and news but anything of substance or merit i try to share here instead because fuck them. i think over time it'll hollow itself out even more.

I cant say they won all around. As a tech guy, now when i look up tech info and click on a reddit link 90% of the top answers are deleted(including all mine from the last 12 years).

Before the exidus, Reddit was already a painful hassle to use, unable to view many normal subreddits now, 80% of my screen taken up by login and cookie warnings, forcing logins, asking if you want the app multiple times. Slow, clunky, broken UI.

IF i want to give info to the Reddit people, i only post links to topics over on Lemmy.

IMO reddit won but only by engaging a new audience. It removed the 1 post per subreddit on the front page without an announcement, modified the upvote algorithm to make upvote numbers seem larger than they are, and comments per upvote are lower than 10 years ago. Basically engagement is way down for people who use it like a forum aggregate. But engagement is way up by people who are migrating off of Instagram and similar platforms. I used to feel weird about being on reddit but now I have my wife's 20 mostly female coworkers asking me about it. Reddit has a new audience it appeals to and it's creating a weird issue because for some dumbass reason they thought the unpaid engagement generators would stick around after they fucked everything up for a few short term dollars.

4chan's /a/ board isn't good anymore? ;)

Yeah I still use reddit for football. Bluesky is getting better(still too little content), but mastodon was just full of spam for me.

True, I wish people would stop posting about Reddit and Twitter. I don't care about those platforms.

What I miss are the gaming communities. There is no talk about games I play on Lemmy, just general gaming communities and I never browsed r/gaming either. Biggest let-down: PoE even has a dedicated Lemmy instance but it’s empty and abandoned.

There is just not enough demand because only a minor fraction of reddit users got hit by the 3rd-party app slaughter. The vast majority doesn’t care and still stayed on reddit. It was the expected outcome.

Hot take of the day: What doesn’t help with this is how fractured communities are throughout the instances. What I mean by this is if I subscribe to “World News” on lemmy.world, I won’t see the posts from the same type community on other instances, like “World News” on beehaw, in my subscriber feed unless I subscribe to them too (or someone crossposts). This adds an unnecessary level of micro-management and probably also drives people away from Lemmy. The biggest strength of Lemmy is so-to-speak also its biggest weakness.

While I do like it here, it is very quiet, even when it comes to popular subjects like football, pro wrestling, anime, etc - the sort of stuff that Reddit still excels at.

throw bombs. I mean... post controversial takes to popular communities. it will drive engagement.

alternatively, just rip reddit content. don't bother giving credit. eventually the facade of content and engagement can give way to genuine engagement

hmmmm....

Ditto. I also jumped ship and have not gone back. I barely even click on any of the links here to go back to old reddit

Also you are totally not spez!

Obviously

Reddit didn't start that specific, the best thing to grow Lemmy is be active in broad communities, not brandosando but books. When books grows large enough then a sanderverse community can be spun off, but trying to be over specialized just dilutes the users into small inactive communities.

yeah, the sheer breadth of obscure topics that were able to form a sizeable enough group on reddit is so fragile and special and hard to replicate. such a shame.

Never been part of that community personally, but thanks for helping to support the platform. Even if you're not seeing much traction, it's appreciated. What would you think of picking the most engaging Reddit content and migrate it here to help boost community size? Or maybe posting to Reddit with a watermark/credit leading to your Lemmy community?

I was a frequent visitor of the BrandoSando subs. I just haven't found anything over here, though. Got any links? I'll join up and try to contribute, but I'm like you. I'm not great or consistent in content creating either.

Same with a lot of the subs I was at on Reddit. Stable Diffusion is no where near as active as Reddit's.

I noticed a massive drop of quality after the api changes (though it's been declining for a couple years now) and after a while I just realized there is no point, so I mostly only kept subreddits related to my country. The balance of repost bots/trolls/idiots/people who think saying the same joke a million times is funny vs. people you actually can converse with really started outweighing the latter ever since covid hit and Reddit got even more popular (it was on a slow decline regardless). The api changes just made everything even worse.

I'd like to think things here will be better, and to be honest I'm really liking Lemmy so far.

Agree on communities over here getting created during the exodis, seeing a small surge, and then kind of withering. I'm subbed to 15ish communities that aren't even all that niche (3D printing, photography, woodworking) and it's rare that they all get one post per day. There are obviously people lurking because posts will get comments, but I think we're all a little wary of being the person to post a bunch of content for fear of no one else doing so.

The people on here on are on mighty high horses but don't realize they're still in the children's section. It's so cringey. I want to hate reddit but the lemmings here are sometimes vomitable. Stop comparing redditors. Redditors are YOU, just earlier or later. You were a redditor before! If you weren't, then you crawled out of some miracle vaginal and found your way to the lemmyverse.

To be fair, your use of the R word as a pejorative reduces your credibility as a moral compass. I do agree with your overall point though.

I loved r/idiotsInCars and r/idiotsOnBikes, the videos would be so funny and the discussions around them were great.

Some of us do post links to videos. Check out these communities:

Alternative Nation

Full Movies On Youtube

(I dont know how to type proper links)

I quit Reddit 2 years ago due to the content becoming more and more toxic (maybe it was always toxic) and I'm just so dang happy that my favorite 3rd party Reddit apps have a Lemmy client. I'm using Sync and it's like coming home. Functionally identical experience but with a cooler community.

lemmynsfw.com

Wait so you can still browse reddit with third party apps

IDK what you just said or what it means

I'm curious what the trumped up charges were?

I too, was fucked by a trumped up charge. Perma-banned by IP so any new account I setup without a VPN gets banned.

My main account (16yo, "Charter Member") got a subreddit ban. It was reversed a few weeks later by a mod. Then the original mod re-banned me and said "no ban evasion allowed". Then Reddit banned me for evading a ban.

I didn't evade anything. I was allowed to post during a short period!

Perma-bans are fucking crazy.
The correct way to think about them is as a death sentence.
Hatred speech in real life:
    what, like 2 years in prison?
    IDK actually...
Hatred speech on reddit:
    death penalty.

Mod tools only became necessary when communities became larger. I'm sure you'll be fine with what's available when most communities start off small. Hell the Star wars prequel/sequel memes subs actually combined into one sub to keep their communities big enough to survive off Reddit and they're doing just fine.

I’ve been sort of bothered by the uptick of rudeness and combativeness on lemmy lately. When I first got here, it felt like everyone assumed positive intent from each other most of the time, but recently it feels like that shifted. I hope I just got unlucky and it isn’t a bigger trend overall.

If anything, people are worse here, in my experience.

People are rude and toxic on lemmy is well. It’s the internet, that’s the one constant.

lemmynsfw.com

I also refuse to submit any posts there anymore.

Yeah, our server sucks.... Sry broh

It was something like this as far as I remember.

"Stay mad"
"Lives rent free"
"no u"

I miss when trolling was a art.

I'm afraid it's bound to happen at some point

You were a normie at one point too