It completely replaced Reddit for me. I love the project. It is getting better and better.

As others have said, it doesn’t quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren’t here.

Also…the user base isn’t as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You’d click on some thread about Trump’s latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don’t work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.

On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of “Ha, fuck Trump!” “Lol, Russia sucks!” “Company X doing this should be against the law!” etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.

Part of it is just that there’s not as many users, I think, so there’s just not as many posts and thus fewer ‘gems’. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.

The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.

I LOVE the idea of Lemmy and the decentralized web and people coming together to forge our own way. But there’s a far too high ratio of elitism, smugness, arrogance and belittlement to people that just want to discuss the things we enjoy. It is just really unfortunate. I don’t engage very much, or at all really so I understand part of that is on me, but every discussion I find I’d like to chime in on is already polluted by assholes. It’s just disheartening.

It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don’t understand and take way too seriously).

Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to “own the libs”, I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won’t let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about “libs”.

Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with “the libs” than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.

It’s a solid meh.

I came for a reddit replacement and instead I found an interesting subset of what I got at Reddit. And it is not better content or engagement wise. It’s useful but niche, and therefore less useful overall than Reddit was.

I love it tbh. Even when people disagree with me it doesn’t feel like I’m being attacked. On Reddit it feels like I’m being attacked even when someone agrees with me.

It great for me it’s better than Reddit it has that small internet feeling

Meh. Its slow, and the politics are more extreme. I’ve spent a good portion filtering most politics that I can out of my feed.

It’s alright here. There’s enough to keep me off reddit and not enough to keep me on my phone constantly.

It’s ok. Lots of very young people talking a lot about things they don’t understand like its a fact.

Good aside from all the repetitive content. One of the problems with federation, I suppose. Someone sees an article they like and they feel they have to post it on every community related to politics on every instance they can find, for example. Mostly a politics problem, but also memes and gaming and technology. Okay, not mostly a politics problem.

It’s alright. Doesn’t replace what I got from Reddit but I also use it less and it’s only form of social media so that’s a plus.

The political environment is rough. Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic cesspools, which is unfortunate because I would genuinely like to engage with their political ideology more seriously but it’s inevitably drowned out by… well… them.

I’ve blocked most of the top posters over there and things are much more peaceful, if quiet.

There’s still a lack of content creators out there, which is an issue. Growth is going to be a problem because, to be blunt? Lemmy is dogshit before you block all the spam, political shitposting, and those fucking Reddit repost bots.

Until the new user experience is cleaned up I don’t expect Lemmy to gain users on average. I’ll probably spin up my own instance in AWS at some point to play with it, or self host on some inexpensive hardware.

Tl;Dr: I get what I want from it but don’t see it having healthy long term growth

I feel like Lemmy is on its way and its main benefit is that it’s not as cynical as Reddit to EACH OTHER.

So many people on reddit gripe about the smallest shit, especially the Steam Deck reddit, that conversations become either you’re with my ideas or you’re against my ideas. Like even though you’re just trying to help others play a game, “I’m insulting you for free because of the way you said lowest fps is 33 with drops down to 29. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” (of course shoving a meme in there because that’s their identity at this point)

I clearly meant average, but oh here comes -20 comment score when I explain that.

I see nicer comment chains from people on opposing political sides here even though I know a usual reaction these days would be to tear at each others’ throats. Lemmy isn’t devoid of it, but Jesus at least it isn’t like how Reddit predictably uses a scalpel on your comments to find something to complain about.

But I think this might be the result of tailoring my experience over time with instances I want to see from and communities. That level of customization is awesome. But it does suck to see so many instance drama things happening in a much more rapid pace than reddit.

I like it. No FREAKING ADS disguised as posts/comments. I was late to know third party apps exists for lots of things, so being aware of lemmy has changed my browsing habits on other platforms i.e looking for alternatives that work or have a model that I don’t feel too conflicted about (which honestly makes me happier). It’s the right amount of silent and busy for me. I’m just hoping for elephant-obsessed people (among other niche communities) to exist/gain a medium level of traction (frankly, even a basic amount would be okay). I also like that its name sounds like LET ME/ LEMME (lemme do what anything I want as long as it doesn’t harm the next person).

Overall I like Lemmy, but there’s also a lot of doomers on here that do everything they can to make everyone feel miserable. I had to trim out a lot of communities that they tend to infest, so now I’m not getting as much interaction and have moved some of my traffic back to Reddit to have enough things to browse

Linux/FOSS Bros are ruining it for me more and more every day.

Not even with my comments, but others. I’m so sick of seeing basic comments extremely downvoted because “ThaTs NoT OpeN sOurCe”.

Like a post a was reading a few minutes ago about Microsoft Paint being updated, and someone said it was Windows 11 exclusive, and the other guy said Windows 11 isn’t half bad. The comment is super downvoted, because Linux best, Windoze BAD!

You’re going to drive away people who just want to have a conversation if you guys don’t learn how to be normal, holy shit. I’m a tech bro and you’re driving ME away.