The “Not enough mod tools” complaint is valid and I hope that improves as the platform moves forward.

I DO NOT get the disdain for the Lemmy userbase. I’ve been here for the past 4-5 months and can say I’ve had so many more meaningful and fulfilling conversations here on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit in the 10 years I was there.

I think it’s the same situation as between a small town and a big city. Reddit is huge and with a large number of people; you’re going to statistically get a larger number of assholes. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people commenting on anything that hits r/all, so there’s no chance someone else is going to read your 1 comment that is drowning in a sea of other comments.

Lemmy feels more like a small town. Things move a little slower here, but there’s less competition to have your voice heard, and I end up seeing some of the same users time and time again across the Fediverse. I think that smaller feel means more people have a chance to see your content without it getting drowned out by the masses, which means more opportunity to make connections.

Some people suck, but Lemmy has been fucking awesome for me so far and I love this place because of that.

As a 10+ year reddit user who has switched 98% to Lemmy, only checking reddit on my computer every couple days: Lemmy is completely fine, and I have seamlessly transitioned from Reddit.

Its userbase is more technical than Reddit’s, and there’s not as much content. But it is a perfectly good Reddit alternative. I find it isn’t as addictive as reddit, which is awesome. I just wish there were more educational communities akin to AskHistorians, AskScience, etc.

Lotta people coming here from Reddit expecting 1:1 replacement, and then get pissy that the 2 man dev team that’s just trying to keep up with this sudden burst in activity isn’t at parity with the multi-million dollar company that’s been developing their site for almost 2 decades.

Honestly, I’m just tired of the constant comparison. Lemmy can be it’s own thing. It’s a work in progress and it has a lot of promise, but for anyone looking for their reddit experience, there’s really only one place to get that.

He is not wrong. I have had to block and get rid of other instances on Lemmy, because they are filled with toxic motherfuckers, and elitist Linux users

The only times I’ve seen toxicity like this is ironically whenever there is a big wave of reddit user influx, things usually settle down for a while as they adapt to the cultures here (or get banned), it’s not as much of an Eternal September as much as it is a Irregularly Scheduled September.

Most of the active comms here are smaller but better quality than their subreddit equivalent. You even get good discussions here on memes sometimes. (Politics and News here still could be better, though.)

For someone who’s been very unhappy with the state of social media for quite a while, Lemmy is a breath of fresh air, even though there are definitely growing pains.

Seems like this person’s main problem is that they went to lemmy.world, which does basically seem like a collection of all the worst redditors.

This feels like it was written by someone who has never been on Lemmy because that has not been my experience at all.

Reddit is fucking full of bots astroturfing right wing political nonsense and we’re not getting that on Lemmy because those instances are often defederated.

Or, you know, he’s one of those guys who signed up for world when he should have gone to exploding heads.

TL;DR: no. Definitively no.

NTL;R: Okay… let me chew on this.

Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit

For me, at least, non-contributive (“toxic”) [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, “didn’t read but still replying lol lmao”, insults, “I dun unrurrstand”, whining + entitlement, and “chrust me” = “I take you for gullible”. And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.

For the poster complaining about Lemmy, “toxic” would be, instead:

• pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don’t recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
• purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
• concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here…
• contrarians - “oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?”. Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you’d get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote “animes”.
• “ackshyually” - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those “ackshyually” are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.

I know that what I’m going to say is anecdotal, but it’s still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it’s like “don’t do that” “okay”. In Reddit though? Well.

I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.

Depending on which instances yours federates with, you’ll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.

Also Lemmy has backend issues

I’m no coder to claim that the issues are “backend” or “frontend”. Instead I’ll say the issues that I see:

• papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
• a lack of mod tools
• rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I’m in) slows down.
• In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don’t recall this happening nowadays. And it never showed a downtime banana.
• can’t cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way

So… come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it’s likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.

Bad actors

Name them. Otherwise it boils down to “chrust me”. Unless referring to the CSAM event below.

lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM […] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.

I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I’d expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there’s only Spez’s) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here’s what would likelyhappen:

• subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, “we’re being bombarded with CSAM”. They hear admin crickets in return.
• mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
• mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring…
• the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
• Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like “WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!” (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
• the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you’re expected to have a single sub per subject.

and sees an influx of kinder people

Dude. You’re in Reddit. That’s the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook’s community look wholesome in comparison, it’s on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.

And if you still want something nicer there’s always Beehaw. I’m being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it’s a go-to place. Provided of course that you don’t want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don’t want others to, otherwise they’ll show you the door.

To the people who say they don’t run into jerks here or they don’t understand when people say it’s worse than reddit… what rose colored glasses are you wearing? Huge swaths of lemmy are little better than 4chan.

“Oh, you just have to curate your communities.”

Stop. Take your superior than thou attitude and just stop. You are part of the problem.

Many such cases