No Stupid Questions

As others have said, as a "front page" with voting and real people in the comments, I like it. It's like hanging out at the one locals' coffee shop in a small hippie college town somewhere. You don't get to talk about everything you might like, and there's a definite vibe, but the people are generally polite, informed, and surprisingly cosmopolitan. That's where Lemmy really shines in relation to reddit, the quality and accessibility of conversation on general interest and shitpost threads. Even assuming they're not overrun with bots, and they likely are, the biggest subreddits are just noise and fake internet points, or at best a passing conversation with a stranger on a bus.

I still go to reddit for (American) football and mechanical keyboards, but for the former I don't even bother participating, because we've got a fun handful of folks here (to extend the coffee shop analogy, imagine a table in the back with a few professors who fondly remember going to a big football school 20 years ago). For the latter I can get the occasional fix here, and I seek that out, but I like seeing the pretty aluminum rectangles and sharing the little bit I've learned with newbies. To the extent there's still a baby splashing around in the bathwater, I'd prefer not to throw it out, but I'm clear-eyed about reddit's trajectory, and "home" is here.

I'm here because I like the idea of defederated social media, but I hope there will be further attempts at making even better alternatives.

Sure it's the same thing without all the corporate interference. Reddit was small once.

The only real issue I have is that there aren’t that many active communities for more niche topics. I hope it’ll get there someday, but for now we have Linux or Star Trek, take your pick. :P

Not yet but its getting there.

Best I've found, but definitely suffers from lack of network effect

i like the fact that it is not karma driven. like vote on me how you want i don't look at my karma and care at all how people react

It's great. Not enough people, though.

For help on current topics, like how certain things work in a newly released game, I check https://old.reddit.com/ without an account to see what they have.

For doomscrolling/visiting niche themed subs?
Lemmy works equally fine, and with a clearer conscience to boot.

EDIT That said, I do sometimes miss certain hobby subs, such as a Tekken or Toki Pona community.
There aren't any active ones last time I checked.

Mostly agree with what others said, it's fine for me.

Perhaps just a subjective opinion that isn't bound to technology - I find moderators much more trigger happy when it comes to deletion and even banning.

It depends on your tastes. It's effective for me as I enjoy quite a bit of the popular content here (like Linux stuff), but we need far more activity for other topics.

It has a long way to go but it's a good start. The community is very homogenous right now (maybe excluding some of the mainly politically focused servers). It's predominantly male tech people right now and it shows in what is active and the general vibes of discussions. My hope is not only for more niche communities to grow, but also for a lot more diversity of interests and of people in general. We need more women's voices on here for sure. I miss that diversity from reddit. Things have been steadily, if slowly, growing so far from what I can tell, so hopefully over time all this will improve.

Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don't yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.

Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it's designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.

The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.

It's not bad, it doesn't have the massive amount of people to keep niche communities going, but for big broad general topics it's fairly solid. It could use some video and GIF support, but maybe it's just my instance that doesn't support it.