2y ago

Why does Lemmy feel so fresh compared to Reddit?

As a long time Reddit user, there's something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things...

People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
Less trolls (users are probably older?)
Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to "all" when you want more populated threads.
The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.

What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?

268 comments

I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.
- This is a huge part of it. People are in "this is my new home, I'm gonna wash the dishes just this once!". I imagine things will calm down later.
  
  yeah, that's pretty much what happened with Mastodon, as far as I can tell. There are still folks there, but it is much quieter now vs when I first joined it.
- I've experienced this as well and have enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing.
- Yep, I try to upvote everything and comment as much as I can. I'm still confused about how to post to specific instances on Jerboa though. Like I'm typing the name but it's not showing up in the dropdown
  The most discouraging thing that happened was that when I wrote a long and thoughtdul comment and press send, Jerboa gives me the "java type blabla" error, and I lost everything I typed. Then I don't wanna type it again and I just give up on commenting
  Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon! As I understand it it's not even an issue with Jerboa specifically.
  
  I've gotten to the habit of Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C my comments right before hitting Reply, just in case that happens. Luckily, it's been happening less and less, at least on desktop browser. Hopefully Jerboa gets to that point soon, too.
- This

It's called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say "no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here", then we're doomed to go down the same path.
- I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you're doing something cool and interesting? Now, it's very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of....crap. That's what I can think of so far.
  
  I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don't like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you're just censoring unpopular opinions.
  I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
  The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can't be "buried" by downvotes (hidden behind a "[show]" button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as "unproductive" which at some point would block further responses.
  To be clear, I don't think the lemmy "spec" should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.

There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.
This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.
I'd like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.
I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.
- That's sort of what I feel like this is - or at least that's what I've felt from browsing Lemmy. No ads and no ragebait/doomscrolling. There's nothing requiring that I stay engaged - in a way it's almost respectful of my interests and time.
- Yeah, I loved the golden age. Back when everyone had a Geocities homepage and just linked to each other's sites. Back when getting a link to your homepage into the Yahoo index meant something.
- I remember when it died. Web 2.0
  
  As in when the advertising apps came along, right?
- If I were given the opportunity, I wouldnt swtich back to the state of " the good old internet" .
  It was full of popups and viruses. DL speed was 3kbps on good days. Hence without any form of streaming. Depending on operator, you had to pay for the landine communication between your PC and the provider. If a family member picked up the phone from another room while you were using the modem, you got dcded. Of course, one coulnt be joined by phone when he was using internet.
  You have to weigh the pros and cons.
  
  Just because we go back culturally, doesn't mean we have to go back technologically as well.

Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
- Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
  Tbh there's already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
  
  Yea but dont be too hard on the kids. We were sticking frogs in virtual blenders and abusing the /blink/ tag at their age, so let them have their fun.
  
  You can block those communities if you want.
- This is exactly it. I haven't come across a forum where the "summer syndrome" wasn't permanently present in a decade. I'll be lurking around here to see if this is going to finally be it.
- I was a bit late one the social media train, isn't that where the "Eternal September" thing came from?
  
  That's because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who'd never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there'd be a month or so of questionable posts.
- Unfortunately some communities don't seem to exist without the froth. The FIRE community seems difficult to recreate here, or local subs. But do you all remember when r/Bitcoin was mostly programmers?
  
  The FIRE community could use the existing Mr. Money Mustache forums. Only hiccup is, I believe, that it is difficult to get a new account (not sure why that is, maybe that's an old problem and it's easier now). I've lurked that forum for years; they seem like a friendly, helpful, well regulated, un-frothy bunch.
- The funny thing is on Reddit I was mostly a lurker/content consumer. There was little incentive to actually post because your post or comment was likely to just be drowned out in the absolute torrent of other posts/comments. Here I'm actually able to be heard.

This is how Reddit felt 15 years ago. This too can slide in the wrong direction, so we’ll have to be cautious
- There's no way to prevent it entirely. A larger community will slide that way.
  I do think that it can be less encouraged though.
- Advantage is if this thing slides in a direction the majority disagrees with it can be forked. On reddit all changes had to be accepted or you could leave. With lemmy and ActivityPub it's easier to fork the service and have it run in semi parallel to the OG. (Granted forking should only really be done if shit goes sideways)
  Edit: besides, due to the open source status the community has more of a say in where things go
- This is why I am not putting all my eggs in one basket (e.g., I have a Tildes account).
  
  Great idea. I’ve not heard of tildes. I’ll have to check it out

No repost bots, karma farming, or idiots (mostly). The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today. Lemmy right now is how Reddit was a decade ago
- The learning curve to joining the fediverse filters out your average facebook/twitter type that Reddit is filled with today.
  Let's call a spade a spade lol this is honestly it.
  
  It's really not hard to sign up either; for how small the barrier to entry actually is, it's made a huge difference in demographics
  
  Agreed. All of the comments against the protests on Reddit kind of give it away in how little they seem to actually understand how Reddit works and what made it great for so long. They see it as just another feed for them to browse and not a community to foster and participate in. Lemmy feels so great in comparison.

One key difference I found is the lack of user karma. You have no incentive to post something "just to get karma" because there is no global karma on your profile.
This encourages to post what you want to post instead of posting something that someone posted years ago because it's easy free karma
- I just noticed that thanks to your comment. I hope it stays that way on Lemmie - karma farming leads to a lot of low quality content, including bot reposts
  
  If Lemmy accounts with a plausible history ever become valuable like Reddit accounts are, we could see the same behaviour without karma just to build up a history. But for now that seems a long way off.
- I won't lie my first reaction when I figured that out was negative (oh my god but then how will I keep track of how much people love my comments..) but the more I think about it and use Lemmy the more I like it, like a weight lifted off my shoulders.
  And what you said, no point to being a karma fiend when there's no counting, so a lot less easy karma grabs going around.

It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:
http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths
- Great read. I am fanatic then. 🫣
- Thanks for the article.
  So gatekeeping can have positive intentions.

I think the biggest impact is that the early adopters that have left reddit are the heavy users that respected the flow and community of Reddit. So the good of Reddit has come here, but the general populace and the keyboard warriors haven't figured it out yet, fortunately.
It does feel fresh though, like Reddit did when Digg first ate shit and everyone left for Reddit
- Ehh I just like people owned things vs corporate overlords dictating what I can do or see. Keyboard warriors are here tho, have seen many an argument around here about whether to defederated this or ban that or nuke some country.

I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don't want to see.
At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
- Karma is useful on things like discourse or mattermost as a spam prevention feature, you gradually expose features to people who aren't being spammy. The same thing is true of a user joining a new community on the same site.

It's not run to maximize shareholder value
- That was my favorite part! Don't you just love being a tiny cog on the capitalist wheel of despair?
  
  On reddit I deliberately refrained from up/down voting because I hate feeding capitalist algorithms. I'm trying to unlearn that habit now.
  
  I just wish the orphan crushing machine wasn't so slow. JUST DO IT!!! Or preferably don't and stop sucking, but I know that won't happen.

The type of people to leave reddit over the shenanigans going on are certain demographic. The crowd is different, here, bc we're more likely to deal with a new website that's not run by narcissistic sociopaths even if there's less content.
- More left leaning for sure.

Because I’m here (see username)
- Let's see how it turns out.

I find it a lot more like old forums, and there is a loooooot less ragebait (post about Matt Walsh and his piss fetish, Tim pool and his homoerotic fascism, etc).
It's very refreshing and I find myself spending less time on here (searching for interesting content) but more time engaging (instead of lurking)
- I like that I can block entire communities. Never gonna see those weird people that obsess over certain public figures, positively or negatively, again 😍
  
  But that's the thing, on R no matter what you blocked they still pop up in other feeds...so many "news", meme etc. featuing those shits and here...nada. My thoughts are most of thier shit is bot driven, so here it wont get traction (yet) and if they do its easily avoided!

I have also noticed the absence of alt-right/populist right-wing people. But that could go under your point 2. It's refreshing nevertheless.
Also less guerilla marketing. Not missing that shit one bit.
- Are trolls more likely to be alt-right? Idunno, I think all sides can have the same ratio of trolls in them.
  
  I'm sure for many trolls the goal is mainly to cause a reaction, and I think the alt-right stuff is an easy way to do so. Maybe that's a better way to put it.
  Then there's the crowd that populated r/the_donald back in the day. Not sure how much of that was just trolling, but I'm certainly glad not to see that activity here.
  
  True, but there's also a lovely Venn diagram where a significant overlap exists. No one's perfect, but a certain mindset definitely leans more towards being a dick to people than not.
- I've seen a few, but they were mostly contained to more random offshoot instances, and those stirring up bullshit were booted pretty quick.
  I think the inherent instance ownership gives admins a greater sense of pride to keep their localities positive, and a lot off us are still feeling from what reddit became in the last 5ish years and there's a communal sense of keeping that outta here.
  And yes, at least for now. Hopefully those marketing ploys are readily apparent and get kicked to the curb quickly.

It is indeed refreshing. But not sure how long it will last.
- By now, we've all been around the internet long enough to know that good things never last. That's really life: Everything's impermanent. Lemmy will probably suck someday, as will much of the fediverse. But I'm grateful it's good right now and for the foreseeable future.
  
  It could suck someday, but it doesn't suffer from the same things that made myspace -> facebook -> reddit suck. No money hungry executives profiting off underpaying employees to implement features no one asked for and selling astroturfing as a service. At least it doesn't seem that there's astroturfing as a service here yet.
  
  I have hope that as the big corporations enter the Fediverse and start enshittifying it, some of us can sneak off to new instances that just don't federate with them. Then the masses can enjoy their Meta-branded Fediverse, and the tech bros can make their money from it, while the rest of us carry on quietly in a parallel one.
- We're not all trapped in the same building anymore. You can just move to a different instance and still have the same software experience but with the community you prefer.
- Let's hope it keeps that glimmer!
- Just wait until September... ;)
  
  The flood will eventually come
  
  Haha, I was around then, when AOL got big it was like, well there goes the neighborhood.
- I'm realizing that a few weeks ago I wanted a lot of people to flock to Lemmy and away from Reddit. At this point I just don't think about Reddit anymore and find myself hoping Lemmy doesn't get too popular because of everything that comes with that (trolls, meme posters, bots)

As much as I'd love to think otherwise, i think a significant amount of the good feeling and comradery that we're seeing now is due to us being in a bit of a honeymoon phase. You saw the same thing on Mastadon after the Twitter migration, everyone was singing kumbaya and holding hands, but overtime it started to regress a bit (though not nearly as much) towards a more "twitter" feel.
I'm sure over time it'll stop being quite so feel-good and happy, but the fact that it's community run and less centralized will help a lot in the long run i think. A lot of the friction and tension on Reddit was due in one way or another to it's centralization - if you had a popular subreddit that was run by shitty mods, there wasn't much you could do about it. here, you can just create a new version of the same sub on a different instance, and it's a lot easier for people to "move" over to the new one.
I think the lower population helps a lot as well, right now the majority of the people on Lemmy are good faith users who care about the platform and want it to succeed. When you have 100's of millions of users like Reddit does, you're going to get a lot more bad faith users and people who just want generic content to scroll on
- Soon we'll all be strangers and snobs and kick each other in the ribs to say hi

Likely you aren't seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It's not curated to bait you.

Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.
I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.

Agree on all your points! Not trying to sound arrogant here but I think content gets a lot more "bland" with more users, or at least in communities without great passion. It's much more personal here and posts generally puts interesting thoughts in my head as opposed to reddit.

Here, people still feel as guests whereas on reddit, people stayed long enough to feel the place is their's.
("old timers shouln't have to deal with this shit again")
- Exactly, I am very new to Lemmy and have been met with nothing but open arms from every community. Reddit at times definitely felt more elitist.
- Agree completely. I thinkk my reddit account is 13 years old now. I got over the new reddit UI, took me a while. Still the main thing is, the discussions are what made reddit. Right now, everybody seems to be jumping ship to lemmy/kbin, but most of the main topics are either crapping on reddit or trying to compare reddit with lemmy/kbin, instead of letting it be it's own thing.
  My main site will still be reddit, if the quality of posts starts rising without bashing reddit on every 2nd one, then I might change completely.
  Also, the UI still feels a bit basic to me.
  
  I think the comparison is valid though. People want to know if Lemmy is a good alternative for them and you can only do that by comparing.
  It doesn't take away that Lemmy is it's own thing.

You don't have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there's a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.
- Even worse when you browse /r/all, find an interesting post about some topic, join the discussion, type out a long reply, hit send..
  And 3 seconds later you get an automod message that your comment was removed. Because you aren't a subscriber to that (default!!!) sub, or you aren't verified, or you used a word they don't like.
  And even worse: You join a discussion, got some good points back and forth, everything is great. You try to reply to the latest comment in that chain to keep the conversation up and suddenly your comments get blocked. Because it was a /r/blackpeopletwitter post (you didn't even notice as you found it on /r/all) and at some point they only locked it down for verified black users, kicking you out of the discussion.
  I mean sure, have your own space on Reddit (even if it's basically racism), that's fine. But then subs like these shouldn't be default subs on /r/all when they constantly lock down threads.

Aside of people probably being a few years older. Less bots and astroturfing and I bet most people who moved to Lemmy are not your average mainstream user, usually more informed than average. It's easier to talk to calm people instead of the "whoosh I got you buddy" person. With fewer user the chance to get heard and not drowned by meme and joke replies is also much higher. But when more user join this likely changes.
- I think the lack of bots makes a huge difference.

This is a group of like-minded, technology-affluent users that most likely have a higher average age than Reddit.
- As well as higher average IQ, it feels like.
  
  IQ probably has little to do with it. It's socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.
- I felt like Reddit was plagued by the mainstream user during the pandemic. I used to go on Reddit to lurk subs like r/Carding to understand how people(criminals?) steal credit card credentials and dump the balances.
  By reading them I change the way I manage my own OPSEC. I could read just about anything there. Now it's all banned or tightly moderated. Can't say this can't say that. Hope lemmy won't be the same.
  
  If you don't like it, you can always set up your own instance here. That's the beauty of it!

I agree. If lemmy continues to grow, inevitably some servers will be shit, but I imagine there will be other non-federated or less-federated instances. beehaw has already started down that path.
Trolls are generally looking for maximum carnage, so I imagine there's less incentive / reward posting somewhere like lemmy.
- As an experienced shitposter, the shittiness of the posting often correlates directly with the inability of moderators to clean it up.

It seems like the people who actually cared about Reddit and the community left for Lemmy (and others). It definitely shows.
Reddit will learn very quickly that there is nothing particularly special about it. It's a forum. With the people who posted and moderated on there being chased away or even banned, there isn't going to be much of value left on Reddit going forward.
- I agree. I think Reddit is delusional if they think they will be able to successfully monetize what are essentially just forums. Reddit users themselves don't give a hoot about Reddit as a brand, company, or product. They care about communities and being able to have discussions on their favorite subjects. There's no secret sauce proprietary to Reddit at all and people will go where ever everyone else is
- Yeah, couldn't have put it much better myself. I'm fine with it, let them stay.
- It will probably continue as a shell... Like Digg, Facebook and other failed social medias that once were golden.
  
  Yeah, I don't think Reddit is going anywhere, but it won't be as good as it used to be.
- The only thing special about Reddit now it that it became insanely popular and got its hooks into millions of people. Those who are interested in actual discussion will go elsewhere, and those who want to mindlessly doomscroll reposted memes and have ads shoved in their face will stay. That's where they belong.

I love how when I'm creating a post, it acts as a search box that finds similar already existing posts.

For me the vibe here resembles that of hacker news. So I’m inclined to think the population here is early adopters and technically inclined.

There aren't any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.
On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there's less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren't on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-removed. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.

You kind of notice how annoying all that corporate fluff and UI optimized to serve you advertising is when it’s gone.

In addition to what everyone has said, Lemmy doesn't have an established culture compared to Reddit. No in-jokes like the poop knife for example
- I also choose this guys poop knife
- The poop knife has already made its way here 💀
  
  wtf did i just read
- It's inevitable with time though.
  Maybe to a lesser extent, since not every instance federates everything. If clusters start to form, you'd expect some in-jokes to be limited to certain communities / instances.
- TIL about the poop knife!
  
  You're one of today's lucky 10000! Sort of...
- But we do have the no poop guy.
  Refuses to shit. Refuses to elaborate. Leaves.
- huuuuuuuuuurr, we should make a really clever and quirky comment to identify ourselves. something something narwhal bacon sings.
  XD XD ;p
- the poop knife is everywhere on the internet, it's not a reddit-thing

Passion. The people here care enough to have not only left Reddit, but to have made a new community here.
- I love this comment. I want to believe it to be true.

I think it has people with above average reading comprehension because amount of people I saw that said opening a Lemmy account is too hard and they couldn't manage to do it is way too high
- Early adopters of any innovation likely have certain personality traits that make them able and willing to assess a new technology and learn/overcome some obstacles to use it. Maybe those traits translate into pleasant, respectful online communication?
  ETA: I need to see if I still have my old grad school copy of Diffusion of Innovation. It might have some answer in there.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusionofinnovations
  ETA1: Most everyone seems thoughtful and patient. So maybe those are early adopter traits?
  
  That's my thinking. As an example the people who usually end up answering people's tech queries are the most likely to end up here.
  
  What does ETA mean?
- Yeah that's true! If an article is posted, the discussion shows that people really did read the article!
- My wife is a teacher at a small district. She's watched student's abilities drop over the past twenty years and the time of covid left them severely lacking. Yes. Their writing skills are practically not there. It's truly sad.

It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
- This is kinda random but till know i always saw "camaraderie" which i guess is more of a French influence spelling, but TIL comradery also an allowed way to spell it! Also ya I agree w you PLUS there seems to be less bots than Reddit atm
  
  I am aware of the other spelling. The "comradery" way agrees with my lazy American attitude a bit more. English is a strange language.
- RE: #3 - we can all choose to be kind to newcomers. Be patient with people as they make those “Testing from Mastodon - can you see this?” Type posts.

Because it's run by the people for the people! :)

Not to pat ourselves on the back too much but right now it’s mainly the Reddit power users that are here. The normies are wondering why interesting as fuck was flooded with porn as of last night.
- I would consider myself a normie, specifically regarding reddit, as I only spent my time lurking there and already have more comments on lemmy than on 7 years on reddit.
  The current vibe and atmosphere just feels kind of special. Almost everyone is figuring stuff out, no one is down voted for asking some basic questions and I don't have the feeling that some grammar nazi is immediately around the corner to correct my many mistakes, just to get that sweet, sweet karma.
- But that’s good, no? The power users are the minority that actually build the community. So we get the core base of Reddit without the problems you get from that site trying to become more like Facebook and TikTok
  
  This is the truth. It's a lot of what OG Reddit felt like before it became basically anonymous Facebook 2.0

The fediverse is a great system for moderation. I've been on Mastodon for years now and it's stayed pretty pleasant.

I think it's partially attributable to Lemmy phone apps haven't taken off yet. Phone posting is a different medium than desktop posting with regards to McLuhans "the medium is the message" principle. Phone usage appeals to the lowest common denominator. People use it as a time waste to mindlessly scroll. The cognitive load is much lower. Thus shitty content bubbles to the top because that's all the brain power people are giving it. Phone usage is not conducive to consuming depth of content nor contributing it.
Additionally I think the lower cognitive engagement tends to lead people into greater fuckwad behavior. You aren't on a board with human beings on the other side of a keyboard. It's just a stupid app on your phone.
I think if I'm right then in time Lemmy with death spiral not unlike reddit if phone apps mature and Lemmy apps become a mainstream daily use type of affair. I doubt that will happen without the capitalist engine driving it though.
- Am on phone. Should I skip for low cognitive effort?
  
  I'm on my phone too using Jerboa.
- I don't actually think it's got much to do with having a phone app or not. I see what you are saying with the medium being the message, but I don't think the "medium" is phones or computers.
  You're right about the medium being the message though, it's just that the medium is a nerdy federated social media. Right now we are in the first or second big wave of new users. Not quite the nerdiest of the nerds who would have been using Lemmy since the beginning, but we are getting the "early adopters" and the people willing to go out on a limb to try something new. These are the kinds of people who are likely to interact with a community in a positive way, because they are already investing themselves into something before it is established.
  I am using a phone app to write this message right now, it was really easy and accessible for me to login and get to grips with the UI. There are loads of people just like me, in fact I would be willing to bet Lenny is being used by 80% mobile users. It's just how we communicate with the world these days. Very few people browse social medias on a computer.
- You're also forgetting that with a centralized platform everyone is stuck under the same roof. If we do reach that level of saturation then the communities can always splinter into a different instance or group of federated instances.
  The problem with reddit was once we reached the point of everyone being there and the overall quality lowering, there was no refuge for the more engaged users to congregate and reform the communities that focus on quality over quantity. You could try and flee to more niche subreddits but it's really not the same, as demonstrated by OP making this post.
  And then as you pointed out, the financial incentives are very different here, which will change how users engage with the platform and how the platform evolves as a result. Centralized platforms do everything to drive engagement to increase ad impressions and potential value to ad distributors. We have an opportunity to build communities with entirely different business models where growth is not an imperative.

I think because everyone has their own corners, the common spaces don't need to be as toxic. Also, Lemmy's population is self selected because of the still high bar to entry. Lemmy basically feels like early Reddit. The hostile influence of moderators and the backlash anger everyone feels from being mistreated by them into silence is not yet here.

I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.
- Torn between replying with "this!" as a meme about how generic responses like that are used to farm karma and making a joke about how "of course someone with only 1 reputation point would say there's no karma equivalent." Idk how reputation works and if its only internal to instances or a shared across instances. But its possible it does become a karma equivalent in the future.
  
  Reputation seems borked at the moment, it counts downvotes but not upvotes so I'm sitting at -34 right now lol
  
  Lol, I think the first one would definitely have flown over my head without explanation. Also, I don't know if it's instance specific, but I can't seem to find my reputation on my profile, neither on feddit.de/lemmy-ui or Jerboa. Where do you get that information?
  Maybe it could be useful for moderators or admins to access that information? But that also poses the risk of accounts "reputation-farming" like on reddit to sell the account to some bot-farm that uses it for astro-turfing or sth similar.
- There is a thing called Reputation (IIRC) tucked away in your profile. Im not sure if that's a true karma equivalent. Also not sure what you can do with it.
  
  It doesn't matter what you can do with it. You couldn't really do anything with karma either.

Fediverse denizens are really active.
- Yea, I became more active on lemmy than ever was on Reddit
  
  Yeah, engagement is in the Fediverse is colosal in comparison.

I've had more traction on my posts and comments in the month or so I've been on lemmy than the entire 14 years I was on reddit. I'm glad I've moved, couldn't give two shits how it does from here out, I'm away.
- It's nice to be able to speak without being drowned out by cave-fascists.

I have been a user on Mastodon for quite some time but wasn't that active and felt it lacked some content for me. Now that I joined lemmy I learned that mastodon is federated and I learned about kbin! That's what makes it refreshing for me. A lot of new stuff and small communities emerging :)
- The thing that I think makes lemmy more valuable than mastodon is the focus on content versus personality. With Twitter, you followed people because you were interested in what they had to say and share. With Reddit, you followed communities. So even if a lot of the people don’t move over, once enough of the community does, it’ll feel the same (or better). I was never super active in my various subreddits (although I did comment, I just never posted), but I’m making an effort to comment and vote a lot on here just to help build that sense of community
  
  Yeah that perfectly summarizes my feelings aswell. The topic oriented communities are what I preferr!
  
  Not disputing what you're saying, but one feature that was a game changer for me on Mastodon was figuring out that I can follow hashtags in addition to people.
  But I do agree with everything you said!
  
  Really good summary. I think this is exactly why I never really took to Twitter and I never really realized why, but it's exactly that. I'm more interested in topics than specific people.

I noticed the same, probably because reddit has become really bad in the last years but I didn't realize it until I joined here a couple of weeks ago.
It's indeed refreshing being able to have honest discussions on a platform that's not infested by bots, propaganda, disguised ads, mass shitposting, hidden agendas, etc.
If lemmy becomes wildly popular to the masses, it's possible things will change for the worse, who knows, but I'll enjoy it a lot in the meantime.
- I feel exactly the same. It’s really feels like the early days of reddit on here. Everyone is nice and the content is genuine.
  I got really tired of typing out comments only to delete them because I didn’t have to patience to be told I’m wrong.
  If things go bad here and the bots and the ads take over, we can move to another instance make new communities and start over.

I think there's many contributing factors. I actually was thinking about the same thing before I found your post, and the answer that came to mind outside of some of the ones people posted here was:
It feels like a breath of fresh air because we're outside the Walled Garden. We're not trapped on a platform who's soul has been crushed and wrung for every penny's worth like Reddit or Twitter. And we can see that there is a world on the Internet besides the Walled Garden and that fact is very liberating. It makes you feel like you don't have to go back.

Lemmy "feels refreshing" because it is new to you. This deliveres a dopamine hit to your brain because we inherently find new things exciting.
As a concept it is the same public forum we have had for a long time. But it is decentralised which does help with restricting the ability of single groups of people from taking control of the native, so that is a good side-effrct.

I think it all boils down to an older and more geeky user base.
- Let's enjoy it while it lasts. This feels comfortable like the internet until the late 1990s. I didn't realize I missed that. And when it starts to be exploited for profit, trolled for whatever reason people troll things, and swamped by bots, let's sneak off somewhere else they don't know about and do it again.

The people aren't assholes. The place is not that big to be totally ruined.

Definitely people here are much more polite, the contrast is just striking.
- I haven't seen a single comment that began with "Imagine.." yet. The lack of immature and pointless sarcasm is a breath of fresh air
  
  Those users aren't intelligent enough to understand what the Fediverse is, why they should use it, or even how to sign up.
- (Love your pfp!)

There are less reposts bc its newer and bc there is a lot less bots

On reddit, half of the users are bots controlled by various corporations and state departments.

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