I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
I agree. Overall, the culture feels pretty similar to Reddit, except without the many small, niche communities that I loved about Reddit. The amount of bigotry I personally see feels pretty similar in terms of percent.
Plus, there’s some problems here that Reddit didn’t have. Hexbear users, for example, love to do rather annoying trolling even in threads outside of their instance, often spamming their comically large images (I know they’re not supposed to be that big, but they spam them anyway). There’s been no shortage of defederation drama over and over in different instances.
If anything, I find the various comments expressing how good Lemmy is to be… a bit forced? Like, do they really believe that, or are they trying to convince themselves? Frankly, I’m only here because I don’t want to give Reddit (the company) any money unnecessarily (plus they need the competition). The tech is kinda cool, but I honestly don’t care that much and it’s got a whole load of problems to make up for that. I also do like that it’s open source, (even though I don’t personally have the motivation to code outside of work anymore).