Less repetitive, less “inside” jokes that get spammed, people reply. I got used to arguing so much that I get defensive here, everyone wants to argue over everything on reddit, while here ppl are more likely to show interest.

To be honest, here’s the difference: Lemmy has fewer voices. That’s mostly it.

I think there’s less trolling and fewer bots, but it’s not by a lot and that’s just for now. If Lemmy gains popularity, it will get just as much negative attention, the main difference will be in moderation.

It’s been less “mechanistic” so far: fewer canned replies, fewer “oh this post again”. It’s partly because of there being very few bots and less astroturfing, but also I think it’s just the mindset, people here may be less likely to be passive consumers. On reddit I kept having the issue of people misreading everything I posted, because they barely cared about what they had on their screen and wanted everything on it to cater to their taste. Big social networks encourage a form of algorithmic solipsism.

Disclaimer: I always viewed limited subreddits that fed my interests, and my Home feed. I never looked at All, because it never seemed to have things I’m interested in. That probably influences how I perceived Reddit.

Reddit:

• Way more niche topics. It was quite possible to find people who shared the same narrow interests as you. On Lemmy, having conversations about these things is hard.
• Towards the end, there was a much greater tendency for top comments to be a joke/quip/insider joke as opposed to actual thoughtful discussion.
• It felt like there was a much greater tolerance of nuance and complexity, though this was also showing cracks towards the end.

Lemmy:

• Politics definitely swing a bit more towards the left. In some cases this means “people just talk about corporations doing bad stuff more”, and in some cases it can mean some pretty out-there positions, like people fanboying for China or terrorists.
• It’s much, much harder for me to find activity on topics I’m interested in. If you’re outside of Lemmy’s handful of interests, not just finding but even building topical discussion feels like a struggle.
• Not everyone, but I do feel like I come across more people here who feel… allergic to nuance. Frankly, I think this might be less of a Reddit-vs-Lemmy thing and more of how just social media in general is shifting these days.

Things are smaller and more intimate (in that I can recognize more usernames).

I’ve blocked more users here than on Reddit though. Mostly just users that are annoying/spamming/give me really weird vibes. Actually, I don’t think I blocked any users when I was on Reddit.

You can tell that Lemmy houses Reddit refugees…and some of them are refugees because they were completely banned on Reddit, and likely deserving, lol

I never comment on posts >100 comments. They’ll never get seen. Here? There’s a good chance to reply.

Depends massively on what subreddit on Reddit, and to a lesser degree, what community on the Threadiverse. /r/AskHistorians, /r/seventhworldproblems, /r/Europe, and /r/NFL don’t have a whole lot in common.

I think that in terms of content, the Threadiverse today is much closer to very early Reddit than to Reddit over the past ten years or so. Reddit used to have a much heavier tech focus, lot of Linux too, though it tended to be more Lisp, academia, and startups. A lot of the people who came over early on the Threadiverse are far-left; the proportions definitely differ a lot there. I’m pretty sure that there’s a higher furry and trans content ratio, but that’s harder to judge; it may also just be people using avatars and home instances providing a hint.

A significant chunk of people on here seem extremely depressed. That was definitely not my take on especially early Reddit, which was fairly upbeat (though I do remember one Italian guy on /r/Europe who kept talking about how terrible Italy is today and how much better the 1980s were).

I think that there are more people who are kinda…I’m not sure how to put this politely. A little unglued from reality. I mean, I remember back during Bush’s time in office, there being a lot of 9/11 conspiracy stuff on Reddit, but I feel like the proportion of people whose general take on everything feels extremely paranoid is a lot higher.

It definitely feels more international, less US-oriented, to me, and I frequented /r/Europe.

I feel like there are more older people. I have seen some website analytics of Reddit, and as I recall, it averaged something like early twenties. That may have changed over time, but I’d still bet that the median age here is higher.

Most of the subreddits that I used had far more users than even the most-active communities on the Threadiverse. This meant that there was a lot more content. On the other hand, it also meant that it was increasingly-common to spend a lot of time writing something, only for it to be buried under a flood of other content; if one didn’t get a comment in pretty early in a post, users just skimming top comments might never see it. That was even more-true for posts – one’s chance of a post attracting attention in a community where a new post arrives every few minutes and many people just view top posts was not good, whereas here, I’m pretty sure that almost everyone on a community sees it. I think that Reddit had a better variety and amount of content to consume, whereas I feel that it’s more-rewarding to contribute content here.

For the same smaller-size reason, it’s a lot more common here for me to recognize usernames. Especially late Reddit, the chance of recognizing anyone off a subreddit, other than a few extremely-prolific posters, was not high. I’m talking to pseudonyms, sure, but it’s “Kolanki, that furry dude that I remember”, or “Flying Squid, that guy who mods a bunch of communities”, not another user name that I’ll probably never see or remember. I think that that affects the environment somewhat, that people act differently in a crowd of people that they “know” than in a crowd of strangers.

The Threadiverse in 2025 isn’t a full replacement for me in the sense that Reddit has a subreddit with some level of non-zero activity on virtually any topic remotely of interest that I can think of. There are a few subreddits that I used to read regularly, like /r/cataclysmdda, for the video game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. !catadda@sh.itjust.works has very little activity, and for most video games, software packages, products, etc there isn’t a community. Some subreddits dealt with content creation or all sorts of things, and the userbase just isn’t here now to support that. So what I talk about differs somewhat.

I feel like users on the Threadiverse are less aggressive. Maybe it’s moderation or the userbase or who-knows-what, but I remember a considerably higher proportion of flamewars on Reddit. I felt that there was a much-higher tendency for people to want to get the last word in on Reddit.

I have seen far less trolling than I did on Reddit (or Slashdot).

It’s hard for me to judge the impact of LLM-generated bot comments on Reddit. I didn’t personally notice many, at least on the (mostly-not-largest-in-size, so maybe not heavily-targeted) subreddits that I followed, but I’ve seen plenty of people on both Reddit and on the Threadiverse complaining about LLM-generated comments on Reddit, so unless they were outright wrong, either I couldn’t pick up on some or they were targeting larger subreddits. It wasn’t to the point that my conversations felt degraded, at least not at the time that I left.

The Threadiverse is smaller, and I think that I’ve seen content on one community inspire related-topic conversations on another. I don’t think I recall that on Reddit.

Lemmy is far more left than reddit which is impressive because I already felt reddit had a hefty left wing bias. I didn’t know how much more left you could get until I got here lol.

The userbase is a much less varied. Being more skewed towards the extremely progressive and tech savvy “nerd” types. Which makes sense.

The quality of conversations here seems better. More actual responses and less “meme dunking” karma type comments.

Mentioning Windows in a poaitive context vs Linux results in al.oat crucifixation. /s

I never used reddit as much as I do the Threadyverse, but I get the feeling that here the mods are much quicker to dele my comments. But this might really be related with how little I used reddit.

When it comes to content, it seems more positive.

Everyone here isn’t a smug dick who thinks they’re a fucking comedian, trying to one-up you, or splitting hairs over pedantic bullshit like it proves something.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m not met with slurs or death threats every time I post to an android related community. I always hated posting to android related subreddits because of this, especially considering the fact that the mods would punish me instead of the ones being vulgar/aggressive towards me.

So far the only thing the only “bad” thing that I can recall happening to me in an android community here on Lemmy was that a post I made was removed for “not being specific enough to android”. I personally think that Lemmy isn’t popular enough yet to justify doing that but I do understand their decision.

Y’all are way nicer.

A lot less conversations about whether ChatGPT was an asshole at his cousin’s wedding

Lemmy is WAY more left-leaning and instance/community mods are often more trigger-happy when removing comments/banning people.