As enthusiastic as I am about Lemmy, the fact that the handful of niche communities that I followed on Reddit might not ever get here is my biggest fear about the platform. That said, time will tell, and for now I’m enjoying using Lemmy in a way I hadn’t used Reddit before.

The only reason I reluctantly keep my account is because of a few niche communities I lurk and sometimes comment in. And I’ll add that Reddit is usable thanks to the old interface + uBlock Origin and third-party apps on mobile (and we all know what’s happening next); I’d call it “alright” just as a euphemism for “not (yet) as bad as Facebook or Instagram”.

The decentralized and community-driven model that essentially guarantees Lemmy being free from big corporations creating the ad-centric hellscape of centralized social media. That, and the UI is much clearer and feels lighter, even compared to Old Reddit.

probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting.

I’ve actually noticed myself doing this by instinct as in the last few months I mostly read Reddit comments sorted chronologically. Part of that is because of the hivemind problem in certain subs, which frankly is even less tolerable the more trivial a subject is, as in, for example, subs for fans of a certain artist where other users jump to downvote people who dare say that not every thing the artist does is perfect. And what’s even the point in discussing things if everything is “how good this is”, “how amazing this is”, etc.?

I had been lurking on a few Lemmy instances for years (more or less since mid-2020 when I started getting more interested in FOSS) and with the Reddit shitshow I finally decided it was time to join, so I was already quite familiar with the concept of instances and how the Fediverse works on principle.

I’m slowly exploring more to find interesting communities to interact with, and hopefully there’ll be more incoming users from Reddit creating more niche spaces.