It’s not what it does — it’s how it does it.

Lemmy is a form of social media that truly belongs to its users, including you, not a soulless commercial entity. You want to change the code? You can do that. Run your own instance? Host your own community? Make your own moderation rules? There are instances at all corners of the political compass each with the freedom to use Lemmy how they so desire.

Lemmy is yours, to use however you see fit, and with the mutual consent of other server operators and their users. It’s radically different from a business.

The audience is mostly the same so you're not going to find many differences there. It's mostly the platform and its philosophy you'll find a difference in.

To me the way it's better is that it's more free in a sense. For one it does not even attempt to limit what software you use for browsing it, but also if you very dislike certain people/content, like-minded people can host their server without losing access to most of the other content, while being able to block the unwelcome instances and users.

Downvote brigading is not a technical problem though, but a people problem, isn't it? So the solution against that would be stricter moderation, maybe banning a few more instances (but that's not really a good solution unless it's very extreme), and making people downvote less.
Hmm, thinking about it, maybe a daily per-user "downvote budget" would be an interesting experiment? To see if it would be effective. Or with an other interval, but still not too long, and maybe partly connected to account active days (not account age).

The votes don't matter. Reddit trains you to be addicted to the endorphins from updoots. The more you use Lemmy, you find that no one cares about karma, half the people sort by "new" anyway, and even if you wanted to know your karma, you'd probably have to figure it out with pencil and paper yourself.

It's easier to start new communities, there is a mod log that shows everything the mods do, and if something is off, you can generally just send a message to the server admin(s) and they will reply. You know, like normal human beings.

There are fewer people, which means less content, but also more of a community feeling. It's like how reddit used to be in the good ol' days.

Check out the different clients available at LemmyApps.com or the Lemmy Apps Directory.

Democracy manifest!

For me its multiple reasons.

I really like the aspect and feeling of a small bonded community. There are a lot of people that are fairly active on Lemmy and you see them quite often.

The next thing is, that I personally had the experience, that people on Lemmy are much kinder than on Reddit. There are so many kind people on Lemmy and I had a lot of useful conversations that aren't like two monkeys throwing poop at each other.

What's also a really good thing is, is the fact of redundancy and federation. The fact that there are multiple instances, each with a unique style and feeling, is good so that everyone can find an instance that suits their needs(or they can host their own one if they want to). There are also sometimes multiple communities for the same topic on difference instances. I as example have blocked lemmy.ml due to their modding behaviour and I don't want to support this. This also means, that I won't engage in their Linux and askLemmy community's, but this isn't to bad, since both have duplicates on other instances.

Smaller community means your comment will get some actual attention

Third party apps

it's not. still have power hungry mods that ban and block your messages on the slightest disagreement. it's still a cesspool, but mostly because of the public.

It's more Linux memes for me.

No ads disguised as posts.

So.. Two things..

I have a funny story regarding modding on Lemmy..

Ran into two bad mods the other day (related to the same convo). But, gist of the story is, I got into a discussion with someone who heavily exaggerated and claimed I wanted to kill an entire minority, as I only 80% agreed with them (they were basically demanding government benefits which would cause a huge issue if applied to other communities which was required to be fair , and they couldn't even set the parameters of the rules for it). A Beehaw admin freely ignored the outrageous comment that the other mod made, and branded me instantly as "starting a fight".

As I was deleting my Beehaw account, I noticed that same non-beehaw mod had actually been in a thread I had also posted in a month ago which was discussing more conservative people moving to Lemmy (I'm VERY left). They basically said in the discussion they were constantly needing to remove "conservative" and people who were trying to start fights . This was ironic because doing the huge exaggeration thing and calling someone a derogatory name is basically out of the conservative playbook (and they were certainly the only ones fighting), and anywhere else it would be seen as rediculous behavior.

People in that thread though also made it sound like the rest of Lemmy was a cesspool. This colored my opinion of Lemmy and I realised my opinion came from that same thread, so, I didn't want to leave beehaw, and only took the leap recently.

I was actually hugely surprised by Lemmy World. Everyone is a lot more respectful here than I expected and I think its even a better safe space than beehaw, where . There are a lot more connected instances, so the bad actors get drowned out easier, and it promotes a healthy discussion, where science is encouraged. We might not all agree, but it's a lot easier to avoid echo chambers. The science memes community is also AWESOME on Lemmy and beats anywhere else imho.

Reddit on the other hand, doesn't seem to have good moderation (most mods are unpaid and the power hungry ones will try to manage hundreds of communities). It has degraded into people fishing for karma , and has a higher percentage of abusive people who also likely abuse others on facebook (many aussie subs have degraded into far right wing where science is discouraged and people purposely try to push an echo chamber). THere are a lot of good mods here though, and if you don't like a community, you can block it and find another one.. The cool part is that I suspect over time, this will eventually keep mods honest.

The biggest problem is that Reddit SHOULD have acted on FatPeopleHate, the Donald and Female Dating strategy. They didn't act on jailbait either apparently. Those people established themselves permanently into the community, grew to some of the largest communities and the moment mods left, many of those same communities likely did a power grab too. Reddit staff don't really care either, and since the people running the servers don't seemingly care (similar to facebook), it simply encourages them

It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).

The only benefits I care about is that Lemmy has "third party" apps

Typical comment quality is off the chain. Leddit has been going downhill for years in this area.

You’ll find more people who you can relate to on Reddit if you’re a fairly normal person. Lemmy is still small and mostly an echo chamber as everyone shares the same opinions. Most of us simply came here because of the API issues.

We need someone to write a fediverse manifesto that explains it for the uninitiated like the GNU Manifesto did for free software.

Much more diverse opinions mainly because there are more non-Americans percentage wise.

I'm here. :)

You can practice dogpiling to your heart's content.

Users are kinder, discussion is better. There's no need to drive engagement so there's no algo pushing conflict and outrage to the fore.