Hey everyone, I’m new here and just testing the waters. I’ve been on Reddit for years, but lately it feels like a mix of heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried.

For those of you who’ve spent real time on Lemmy: • What do you like better here than on Reddit? • What do you miss from Reddit? • Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?

I’m curious how people see it — especially those who made the switch after the API drama.

  • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    Yes. Some instances will block (known as defederate) other instances, so you won’t see any users or posts from those instances. Some instances disable downvoting. Many are similar to each other.

    Lemmy.world is the everyman instance though, so you will get the broadest look at the fediverse.

    Some instances will be topical themed, such as mander.xyz (science), or programming.dev. others have political and aesthetic leanings: lemmy.dbzer0.com (Anarchism, AI and cyberpunk aesthetics).

    • vegals@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      27 days ago

      Oh whoa sick. Reckon I’m about to nerd out on this for a bit. Thanks for the starter points.

      • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Something to be aware of is that lemmy.world defederates the two major communist Lemmy instances (hexbear and lemmygrad) - preemptively, by the way - so if you have any interest in seeing that, you will need to look for another instance. Lemmy.world is generally considered the main liberal/neoliberal instance. Now that Lemmy allows each user to block entire instances, I feel that the idea of some instances deciding for their users what they should or should not be allowed to read is ridiculous.

        I picked my instance, lemmy.zip, because it’s one of the few major one that only rarely defederates other instances, usually only for illegal content or spam reasons. They took a more reasonable approach to the communist instances I mentioned, by blocking them by default since some people consider them controversial, but using a user-switchable block, meaning that you can very easily unblock and see content from those instances.