I love the communities for my hobbies. I hope they will be just as active as on reddit.

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

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.

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.

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

amazing circlejerk subs

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.

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

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.

I'm looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I'd like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with "I also choose this guy's dead wife" or "not my proudest fap" because it's a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.

So far Lemmy is delivering and so I'm engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.

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.

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

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.

• 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.

A false sense of not being alone.

Ironically Reddit mostly became a “filter google bullshit response” site. I miss the community stuff from Reddit of 5 years ago, I think Lemmy is heading in a good direction.

It was porn. All porn. All my interests, all in a multi Reddit.

One second I’m a big adult doing very responsible reading news things.

The next am goon.

I liked that any time I was interested in any topic I could type it in and get to a community discussing it instantly.

At first, it was dank memes, public freakouts, instant karma, but as time went on, I detoxified my feed/subs to only include things like mademesmile, animalsbeingbros, bettereveryloop, etc.

I hope to see active communities for finance, international travel, and hopefully u/rusticgorilla will mirror r/Keep_Track here too.

In the twilight years I mostly just used Reddit as an information aggregate.

I'm primarily wanting a place where I can read information for both niche and general topics, as well as read the dissent to that information in the same space.

Maybe I become more engaged in the community. But going from:

Private forums > old reddit > new reddit

Each step felt like I knew and was known by fewer people. All while knowing less about the people I did recognise. I spent a lot of time in "off topic" sections of the private forums, commented and generated a fair amount on old Reddit, and mostly lurked on new Reddit.

I think the whole situation has me cynical about the idea of "internet community", and maybe that's something I need to work on.

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.

Diversity and exposure to new ideas.

Whether I agree with the idea or not, breing exposed to so many different points of view changes how I look at various topics. Sometimes it reinforces and strengthens my position and sometimes I change my stance.

I feel like Reddit (and now Lemmy) allow me to engage / listen to discussions on an issue. Discussions that involve a wide assortment of different viewpoints. It's hard to find that in most places on the internet.

No longer the case on current day reddit, but in the past in the news subreddits, when an article was clickbait one of the top comments would usually point out that it was click bait and why. And that made reddit for me a very useful source to get news from all over the world because it was easy to skip through the biased/clickbait articles.

Then also the specific gaming communities. Lemmy is far to small to have a community for every single game so that's a big loss for me.

I really hope the educational subs like learn programming, personal finance, and so on can be successful here.

Reddit was a place to start the morning and get some news especially on the subs that I moderated. I spent way too much time with it. I am looking forward to friendly engagement of sane people. Reddit had way too much of us vs. them. And their Admins readily bannned all who did not agree with their political and cultural opinions. I enjoy engaging with those who have opinions different than mine, I just do not want them shoved down my throat as I would not force my opinions on others.

Reddit and it's users are good at hyperfixating on a topic and building a community around said topic, with different skill levels. Therefore if you want to also participate, you can simply look up a subreddit for that topic and nearly instantly get answers to your questions and tips on how to start.

Tons of niche/hobby communities are my main interest

these are the main things I care about, until a reddit alternative can provide this I'm going to stay mostly or frequently on reddit.

-somewhat reliable news headline feed from relatively neutral, serious center-right to center-left sources with little to no bad reporting/framing.
-reliably hear about social trends, but with some distance to them
-news discussion with some degree of different perspectives, some expertise, so it's not just all left to the popularity of the headline.
-discussion of movies and tv that is neither too fanboyish/popular leaning nor too indie/arthouse exclusive.
-collections of helpful pro-consumer information and resources, up to date megaposts in hobby communities
-a search function that will often enough lead to some helpful comments for most topics, googling "reddit xyz" was my go to for many years
-feeds for some types of videos, like publicfreakout, livestream clips.
-some communities that are more personal to me, like from my country or a political meme community, for venting and in-group discourse.
-control over what i see in my feeds, most recommendation algorithms and trending tabs just don't work for me
-control over where I engage with content and in what form it's presented, often I take a break from scrolling social media except for seeing some top posts in my rss feed. at some point I just want AI to read out summaries of all that stuff to me and actually visit website interfaces way less often myself.

In addition to what's been said already - the community-specific wikis and megathreads. The amount of information I could find there about sometimes very niche topics was amazing. Hopefully something similar will be possible with Lemmy.

Rebbit was great for troubleshooting tech issues. Subreddits like r/thinkpad r/linux r/homelab etc were very useful it figuring out weird tech issues when google finds nothing useful.

Selfishly - A place to essentially have content delivered in an easy to find/use format 24/7.

Less Selfishly - A place to take part in discussions on shared interests & hobbies.

Unrealistically - A Reddit-like archive of posts to help in troubleshooting or recommending things. Pretty much impossible to replicate what Reddit has at the moment, and, if I understand how Lemmy works well enough atm, not something that's going to happen on Lemmy.

definitely the niche and obscur advices. The parenting communities !

Quick responses to oddly specific questions in niche communities.

Users aggregating links on a specific topic like buildapcsales and gundeals from reddit.

On one hand Reddit is a really negative and 'hivemind' kind of culture. On the other, it was really the best one stop shop for news (general and breaking), gaming, hobbies, information, etc. aggregation. I am hoping that it can fill that void without becoming a hivemind culture. Cheers to the future.

I loved the writing subs. Reading short stories and encouraging eachother to grow.

Hobbies, learning and hopefully a place I can share things I make with people without being called a spammer... At least for a few years.

music discovery/discussion. I found so much cool music on reddit communities for bands or genres I like

resources for learning about & discussing some of my hobbies and interests like FOSS software, Linux, gaming, guitar etc

communities for people local to the city/state I live in

Niche communities are what made Reddit fun/useful to me. It was really nice to have discourse with a community that liked the same video game, movie, hobby, political ideals, etc, that you did.

Guides and tutorials were the other big thing. I utilized and contributed guides on Reddit regularly. It was really nice to engage with a community to solve an issue rather than use some AI generated or ad ridden article.

I hope to see Lemmy fill these gaps and it seems it has the potential to do so.

I just like a 'digital public square' aspect. I want to see what people are interested in today. I want to catch up on the latest news. Maybe I want to learn something new in a hobby community.

Reddit was okay at that at first, but it did start to feel 'gamed' over a decade ago now. People were starting to notice common reposters, 'super users', and its only devolved from there with sponsored posts, awards, and advertisements. That takes away from the public square aspect and instead makes it feel like you are consuming a product.

Help was there when you needed it, even for niche software or usecases there was more often than not someone who had already asked the question or who could help. This has been invaluable every time I've tried something new (eg. Making a static website, learning Spanish, switching to Linux.)

I mostly used it for extremely specific obscure tech issues that were solved 10 years ago in random threads 🙃

The communities or reddit gave me a lot of ideas and suggestions on how to improve my life. I hope that can continue here.

Also - product recommendations. Need a new router? Reddit was great for stuff like that. They would bring up pros and cons that I never would have even thought about on my own.