Nah, Lemmy is just a tighter experience.

Most of my time on Reddit was because of the constant flow of actually new content and "new to me" content (binging subreddits that I had just found out about).

Lemmy only has a constant flow of actually new content and it's slower.

I like it but yeah there's a lot less users so less content. Hopefully it keeps growing and the communities get more active.

It's really good in small doses, like early Reddit used to be. You can quickly exhaust the best posts of the morning/afternoon/evening before you're basically browsing by "new".

It reminds me of the times when reddit would get notably slower and weirder during certain times of the day. Before it became an endless 24/7 stream of content.

Just enjoy the detox.

Right now the biggest barrier for me is the interface. Too many instances favor this very spread out, low information density, optimized for mobile (but not really) look, and group information in ways that are irksome. A certain amount can be fixed by user styles, but some functionality can't, like on kbin when I click on reply notifications and am not actually taken to the context of my reply because the comments have split across multiple pages even though I've set my preferences to infinite scroll. If I'm on another instance, clicking context gives me... well, not the context of my comments, just the damn comment and a series of "load parent comment" links to click. It's, well, irksome.

Most of my gripes aren't insurmountable, but that doesn't change the fact that right now every instance is a little janky to use.

For me it's a little bit more addictive than Reddit since I get more comment replies. This is probably just because I stay away from any big subs on Reddit though.

Are you interpreting that as bad or good? It was clear there was some fuckery going on at reddit for the past many years, increasing rage/anger, bots everywhere, engagement focused bullshit.

Is "doom scrolling" a thing you want to be doing? I'm not implying "you could be doing something better with your time" because it's your time to spend. But at the same time, change is good, right? Maybe instead of having one active platform, mix lemmy up with mastodon? Or start watching every Crash Course and Sci Show video that exists. Look up ZeFrank and dash down that rabbit hole for a couple years.

There are so many automated bots posting links every couple of minutes. I feel like I sometimes have to wade through tons of garbage to get to interesting posts. I've been blocking tons of bots and communities but it still feels like it takes effort to find content which isn't what I want. I want somewhere that I can find interesting content when I'm taking a shit. Lemmy isn't quite there yet.

The big difference for me it's the overall lack of comment interaction on posts here. I was addicted to reddit not because of the content but because of the community interaction below the content.

Side note: Just now my phone keyboard did NOT autocorrect to reddit. It appears I have finally doesn't enough fine away from their for my phone to recognize it.

What I find sad is that on Reddit I was on lots of tech stuff, but also just talking with random tran drivers, firemen, cyclists, and meme people.

On Lemmy its mostly just tech.

There are a lot of channels that are missing from what i did back in Reddit. Many i have no interest in modding so they most likely wont show up for a long time.

Lemmy is down too often to be addictive

I think it's primarily because Lemmy doesn't recommend content, whereas Reddit does. (Reddit isn't as blatant as other social media, but I feel like they do recommend content.) I find that I actually have to go out of my way to search for new communities to subscribe to or more content to consume. It's a bit hard and takes time. But I think it's overall healthier to have control over what you see and can't see.

In any case, if/when Lemmy picks up in activity, I don't expect that we'll need recommendations as much to find new content

There is less content here than Reddit because there are less users here—less users creating content each day. Each of our comments and posts have far more weight and impact on the Fediverse because of this. The more we push ourselves to engage, create posts, or moderate communities when we normally wouldn’t before, the faster we will see Lemmy grow!

There a few things that we just haven't crossed the threshold for yet that I found engaging (if not "addictive") at Reddit, several of which were live threads about an event (NFL/NBA/Soccer/F1/etc). We're not big enough here for that yet, where Mastodon is (you can get awesome interaction on hashtags about topics while they're happening). The other thing was when a post got popular you could scroll through hundreds of comments with at least some thought behind them, and here it's more like 10-25. The content is often better here, there is just less of it. Which is fine for me, it's just a slightly different experience than I was having at Reddit, but I think some of those things will come with time.

I guess this would be just as addictive once gifs and video work as expected, and we start seeing tons of short videos.

Lemmy is definitively less addicting than Reddit, but it is still addicting, because it uses the up-/downvote mechanism.

Less content, and the sorting seems to favor posts that are getting comments rather than new and rising posts. So you frequently have posts over a day old that stay at the top slots of your feed

Lemmy has pretty much replaced my other social media scrolling. I probably spend about the same amount of time here as I used to spend flicking between fb and reddit, but I spend more time reading and interacting here.

Weird that I'm actually more engaged with a platform that doesn't really have an aggressive engagement algorithm.

Doom scrolling wasn't there in the early days of reddit. Lemmy is still new. I think people just had high hopes and expectations that lemmy would be a 1 to 1 replacement for reddit, but that was never going to happen. Reddit has had years to grow and optimize while lemmy is just a fledgling with a niche user base.

Also I think lemmy is missing that hook or gimmick to get, for lack of better words, the attention seekers here that will make posts and content just for upvotes or to show up on everyone's front page. Not saying lemmy needs to be reddit, but I do think it needs a little extra something than just being a decentralized reddit alternative.

That's the best part!

Reddit is crack ... because it took years of cocaine use before users converted it into crack

Lemmy right now is just cocaine .... just keep using it for a few years and you'll eventually start turning the cocaine into crack ... it's still an addiction but right now we believe that we can manage the addiction and use it and not use it at will .. give it time and we will eventually get to the point of doom scrolling endless content like a helpless crack addict. Enjoy Lemmy while you can, we are building a tolerance and we will eventually want to ramp up our usage in a few years and whore ourselves out for the next hit.

You say this like it's a bad thing.