Reddit is still a lot more crowded, but I prefer Lemmy simply because of no ads and the actual conversations that you can have with people.

Honestly, I root for lemmy and use it daily. However, Reddit still wins on pure content and niche communities.

I generally prefer Lemmy to Reddit, although I do miss being able to find niche communities that are both populated and active. Smaller communities tend to become ghost towns around here, unfortunately.

Lemmy absolutely.

• no algorithm
• no ads
• actual real people in the comments
• the ability for third parties to make apps
• the fact that it's not mainstream means most of the people on here are at least a little nerdy which I am here for.
• feels a lot like what reddit used to be 15 years ago before the age of algorithms and bots everywhere.

Lemmy. Federation and the lack of a profit motive makes it much better.

I would also rather be surrounded by leftist vs liberal drama, rather than liberal vs fascist drama.

Lemmy seems a lot less toxic than Reddit. Every now and then I see comments here of people that are assholes, but its not the norm. Whenever I would check the comment feeds in Reddit, so many of them devolve into petty bickering. It seemed like a quarter of the user base set out that day to either be pissed off, or to piss someone else off.

Once I started using Lemmy I never touched Reddit again. So I guess Lemmy.

I prefer lemmy but miss the niche communities. The Swedish national community for instance, roleplaying communities, niche game communities etc.

I haven't used reddit since the announcement of the API changes

honestly, I preferred reddit. But I'm here out of principle.

Reddit by far was a better experience; more content, better moderation, less negativity.

I’m still here on Lemmy, though, in hope of it getting better (and it definitely scratches the same itch as Reddit without the corporate arrogance).

That said, even though it annoys me, I do find myself getting exposed to a wider array of opinions on Lemmy that I just never saw on Reddit. And while I disagree with a lot of it it’s probably healthier for things to be that way. The tankies, though … so many tankies.

Most of the time, lemmy.

Obviously, the difficulty with very niche communities not being useful here can be annoying.

And, being real, the lack of robust moderation tools makes moderating a pain in the ass.

But, overall, I find the people on lemmy less prone to bad behavior, and the discussions more rewarding. That makes up for the underlying missing functional things worth it.

Reddit, even before they went full asshole as a company, had the major problem of being big. Humans are assholes for the most part. The more people you have, and the lower the bar for entry, the more of those assholes are going to be a problem.

Lemmy has assholes too. The usual knee jerk reactionaries, trolls, and that sort of thing. But the very minor extra effort of having to pick an instance reduces how many of the brain dead assholes will put in the effort. The assholes are a better quality of asshole lol.

But damn, there were some long established communities on reddit that simply can't be reproduced here because you can't make old communities. There are a ton of subs that had been around since subs came around. You can't duplicate that kind of organic growth. There's very few C/s on lemmy that have a real sense of community yet. I think it'll happen, but it hasn't had time for a lot of real cultures to spring up the way reddit had.

I miss the hell out of those long established neighborhoods.

I like Lemmy, but it's too quiet, I often only see a dozen new posts total daily.

I haven’t posted on Reddit since they treated third party app devs like shit. I’m done with that site.

After almost a year of being Reddit free, I have been peeking back in there lately. It just doesn’t hit the same but I do lurk in some subs just because of the volume of content.

I do enjoy Lemmy though. I don’t feel as intimidated to make comments and like to feel we’re building something from the grass roots here.

Prefer Reddit’s volume of posts. Prefer lemmy in general. Disappointed that lemmy resembles reddit way too much.

Lemmy.

I do prefer the size of Reddit, but I am continuing the API changes protest. Sup, that's it. If they reverse it, I might return, although the UI has changed again. Wouldn't mean I'd leave Lemmy, just use both.
I haven't actually used it with 3rd party apps, I used to do the same as I am doing right now, desktop website on my phone, but I do support the protests and I am not giving up after 2 days.

My comrades on Lemmy, though sometimes insular, are some of the friendliest, most supportive people I've ever known online.

Focusing on the people and communities, since takes like "Lemmy has no ads" or "reddit has more content" are so obvious that there is zero point in sharing them, I would say Lemmy is better. I think the quality of discourse is a lot higher and people are more likely to type longer, thought out and educated (or well intentioned) comments. If I were to put it really simply, I'd say Lemmy's community is more centred around discussion, whereas reddit is centred around reaction.

However, one issue with Lemmy is that fringe groups and views are overrepresented (particularly left-leaning ones), which can result in an echo-chamber effect in many discussions. I find pile-on attempts, or accusations of fascism, Nazism and right-wing trolling, are a lot more common here towards users who don't immediately join in with a far left circlejerk or attempt to bring a little more nuance or critical thinking to a discussion. Dylan Marron, host of the podcast 'Conversations With People Who Hate Me', once said in an interview that social media pile-ons from people who are actually on your own side hurt a lot more than pile-ons from people who fundamentally disagree with you and I think there's a lot of truth to that. It frustrates me that some Lemmy users shutdown and try to "other" people the moment they have a minor or semantic disagreement with them, instead of taking the time to hash it out or just politely agreeing to disagree. It's kind of ironic that federation allows communities to isolate themselves, yet instead these people remain federated with everyone and then get really offended and outraged when they're confronted with world views that even slightly differ from their own.

But anyway, that type of person is still a minority and Lemmy is, for the most part, a significantly better environment than reddit for polite and intelligent discussion.

I much prefer Lemmy, when RIF shut down I migrated and never looked back. Lemmy isn't as crowded as Reddit became and reminds me of how Reddit used to look and feel.

I also signed up to Mastodon and between the two (Lemmy and Mastodon) get all the information and entertainment I ever got from Reddit without all the dickheads that now populate Reddit.

I prefer Lemmy but I find content and user base lacking

Lemmy. Reddit has become what it was a bastion from.

I avoid reddit out of principle even though I would prefer it. It's only going down hill from here on out and they've neglected their app so much it's too painful to attempt to use it.

My main reasoning is content and sometimes the comments. Content here is a bit slow but a lot commenters are kind of a-holes and painfully obnoxious. Especially from lemmy.ml, always a little anxious when I comment.

Reddit continuously grew more toxic with astroturfers, bots, and other bad-faith actors after the protest. I deleted all of my accounts the day they went public since that was the previously planned line-in-the-sand for me. I only visit periodically every few days to check my local towns subreddit for news. It would be nice to have a bigger community with Lemmy but I certainly don't miss the constant arguments.

I would prefer Lemmy/Kbin but all the communities I actively followed on Reddit are still there

lemmy doesn't have spez, so lemmy is better.

Consider that I’m free to use either of these, and that we are having this conversation here, on Lemmy.

Nevertheless, the thread has been interesting.

I haven't looked back. fuck reddit. fuck spez. fuck their whole puke filled world that was built on the backs of nice internet people that they turned into a profit rearing meatlocker of piss and complaints, still peppered with shitty, out of date memes.

Reddit, but I won't post or engage there on principle.

I prefer Lemmy for:

• actually engaging with content (commenting/posting/voting) instead of simply consuming. By the time the API restrictions came around and the ads/bots started to dominate, it felt pointless to engage on Reddit any more.
• the positive parts of the federated and FOSS nature. Choose an instance, build your own, use or build any client you want to, federate or defederate whoever you want.

I prefer Reddit for:

• getting info/recommendations on things. The knowledge base is magnitudes larger than anything Lemmy can offer atm. Also, due to the centralized nature, it's so much easier to search for something on Reddit.

Lemmy's got some problems and I can't stand the interinstance drama, also, due to the decentralized nature, some instances can't keep up or the admins don't care any more, so whole communities can essentially be held hostage or simply die until a toolset to move a community from one instance to another (and propagate the change properly to the Fediverse) becomes available.

Lemmy, and I'm never going back. I just wish we had the abundance of content that Reddit does. There's a lot of communities I miss.

Honestly, at this point I kinda prefer to go on Reddit. I'm getting tired of all the tech/FOSS talk and there's so much doom and gloom on here it just bums me out.

I haven’t touched reddit to browse it since I made my lemmy account. I still wind up there from an occasional search with no other relevant results.

The way lemmy functions is vastly superior to reddit IMO and I have no plans to return.