No Stupid Questions

So when people say "better" in this context, most likely they mean the general feel tha objective reasons inpacting day to day user experience.

The objectively better features are open source nature and the decentralization - but this may actually make user experience worse (meaning more complicated to understandandget into).

As for the "better feeling" aspect, it just feels more like Reddit used to be once upon a time. Everything is more natural. Reddit is a very mainstream and corporate place and you can feel it for at least few years now.

i would say its sufficiently less toxic then reddit (i think bcs lemmy is a small website)

It’s not better, yet. It’s not owned by anyone, except the server owner, you can block any instance you want, join any instance you want and still access the same data. It will be better once it is the knowledge repository that Reddit became before all the “line must go up” entered into it. It’s mainly memes and news, but there are a ton of growing communities that are accruing a wealth of information every day, so I don’t think it will take much longer for it to be better.

Federation, this makes it immune to large-scale disruptions because a single instance may go down or a couple of instances may go down at the same time, but the entire network cannot be taken offline all at once without taking the internet itself offline.

I've been avoiding the political BS and finding it much better. Easier to avoid the vitriolic stuff here too. And you can turn off seeing comment and post scores so downvotes don't exist for me.

I haven't seen nearly as many obvious rage bait bot posts either.

I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I've been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it's thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.

To echo, it's not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It's not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren't killed for no good reason over here.

Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed...not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There's less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.

I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.

But the memes can be really good, it's still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how "the other side" thinks, possibly even why.

The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it's consistently been the exact opposite of that.

I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one