I find it mostly better than any other option available, but the polarization of the people here is sometimes hilariously out of control.

There are still echo chambers just like Reddit.

For larger communities it’s great. For small communities it sucks. People need to let the mainstream ones grow before branching to these smaller communities.

Outside of that the community is incredibly lefty, I am pretty liberal too but it’s pretty wild how much it leans. There’s also a huge fascination to have everything be FOSS , Linux, and using Firefox . Ex the audacity of the Sync developer charging for an app was hilarious.

I keep running into the same fucking idiot, it’s like suckmywang has all the same interests as me. This site would be a lot better without them tbh

I've found that I rarely get called out for poor spelling or grammar on lemmy compared to other sites. So long as it is pretty obvious what the correct word or grammar is no one cares to mention. The exception is if the mistake is particularly humorous.

more active in terms of not feeling drowned out, but also just as much if not more fickle about things that are posted, so i basically stopped doing that and do the occasional comment if im feeling fanciful

I am all for having more people, but being an obscure "site" is a good filter imo.

The Voyager App has some bugs, but for what it is, I'm amazed by the polish.

On Reddit, all I did was look at memes from the top subreddits, spending my day filtering through the vastly unfunny majority. It's also through memes that I kept up to date with the news.

On Lemmy, I decided to not fall into that sort of doom scrolling again. I blocked all meme communities. I browse through "All" to find any obscure community that peaks my interest, block the ones that don't and add the ones that do to "Home" or "Favourites".

This means my feed is much more curated than the slop I was ingesting on Reddit. I still doom scroll sometimes 😅, but it's better now than it was before, I think.

1. There's a lot less people over here, but that will get better over time.
2. The community is a lot more left-leaning. It's not that I don't like this. I do agree with most of these opinions.

Generally discussion has been more mature and respectful. Still, I think people are more likely to downvote things they disagree with but I think happens more in controversial topics like Threads defederation, Gaza, and politics in general.

If you want to compare to Reddit, they tend to hide comments with negative scores anyway, and though I can't see the upvote/downvote ratio for comments, having 5 upvotes and 4 downvotes feels worse than 500 upvotes and 400 downvotes. The points don't matter anyway so don't even bother worrying about them.

Just be nice and think of the other person.

ETA: You also have to curate your feed a bit to block stuff you don't want to see, certain accounts and stuff like the immature trolls on hexbear.

It's about the same as everywhere else. The most fun I have on any social media platform these days is blocking assholes.

I didn't use reddit that much before switching to lemmy (only browsing a couple of niche subreddits that I liked), but in general I do like people here a bit more. At least in my experience, I saw more people here willing to have discussions when compared to reddit, which is something I do enjoy from time to time.

That being said, I must agree with a lot of commenters in this thread - there is a lot of propaganda on this platform and that's a part of lemmy that I have the biggest gripes with.

Much ruder and angrier, and prone to accusations of fascism for any deviation from groupthink. Basically like Reddit but worse, and with less content. Never mind.

It is the exact same as reddit, only there's less content and comments.

The people, mods, bots, and content are all just the same. There's even still people shilling covert adds on here. It's just cheaper and easier for them to get to the front page of lemmy, since you only need like 20 bot/fake accounts.