Just want to say that every time Reddit does something shitty like this, Lemmy will get a boost. And with Lemmy constantly getting better (both community and platform), I’m willing to bet these boosts come with smaller user drop offs every time.
At this point (and with Sync, as I used for reddit), Lemmy is indistinguishable from my reddit browsing experience. Except on Lemmy I don't encounter constant hostility.
There are a couple of communities I miss, like r/fountainpens and r/suzukisamurai. Im sure I could figure out how to create those communities, im not sure I'd be a good mod.
I've been lucky so far, but ever since leaving reddit I've been in an infinitely better mood. Sometimes reddit would bring out the worst in me as well, and I'd be short with people or needlessly confrontational. You could tell when I was in a shitty place mentally because my post history would shift from light-hearted and sentimental to easily annoyed with frequent cursing. Reddit's algorithm really fine-tuned its way under my skin, and I found myself increasingly angry as the years went on. US political issues really got me going. I was never more irritable and mad at the world than I was over the past few years on reddit. Now all of that is just gone, and my Lemmy usage is about 20 minutes per day. I'm in a much better place.
The quality of posts and comments overall isn’t where Reddit was. That comes with volume, though.
Also, I haven’t found a single niche community that does what Reddit did. For instance, if I’m into a specific show, Reddit was my go to place for discussions about a new episode. Lemmy does not have that for any show I watch.
Niche comes with volume too. And really, niche is what's important, not the broad strokes (I'd argue the boons of Lemmy are broad strokes at least). Reddit is worse for a lot of reasons, but man oh man, how can you convince someone to come over when the value is in the volume? I'm still primarily on Reddit, actively contributing to the problem.
That and the impact. The amount of communism or total and complete anti capitalism without nuance or depth, right or wrong. Reddit was very left, but not like here!
Tankies aren't communists anyway. They're Russian trolls, CCP shills. Those are fascist dystopias. Just mention Ukraine being invaded and they go ballistic.
You can no longer op-out for targeted advertising based on use habits (like if you visited canned sardines you could get ads about sardines on the canned sardines subreddit but not on cheatatmathhomework, now you could get ads about canned sardines in the math subreddit and about brilliant on the sardines one)
but also, with every influx it waters down the spirit of lemmy a tiny bit in exchange for more activity / content / perspectives. which generally is worth it so far, but even still i can already see some discussions on here getting worse, with shittier viewpoints i wish were quarantined in facebook
No it it also has the effect tof the people who dropped off probably won't come back. Yah I tired it and it sucked. Lemmy blew it's big chance. Yes it has grown but could have been bigger.
I don't think it works that way. A free service like Lemmy can be tried multiple times. People aren't just going to ignore something forever cause they tried it once and it sucked. People understand that software evolves over time.