My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What’s nice to me is that I’m not replying to this on Lemmy. I’m able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
Me: Here, take my upvote!
Kbin: What am I supposed to do with this??
(But seriously, you’re right, it’s awesome)
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that’s what gets people to spend the most time on the site.