The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.

The basic idea seems to be that it should be pretty similar to reddit, but with federation. Definitely still seems to have its own separate character though. And different instances have their own unique cultures, some more differentiated than others.

Less obligations, no ads and better apps. Everything else is either the same or worse.

I scroll Lemmy by ‘new’ and what I see is either interesting or not to me, and I see some really good memes, get a decent overview of news stories, and learn some neat things. There aren’t really local channels active for where I am.

I scroll Reddit by /all and what I see actively annoys me, is paywalled, is a repost, or is ragebait (or EPIC PWN RESPONSES to ragebait). I go to my local subreddits and there’s some value among all the paywalled content, repetitive text posts of whinging (stuff like tipping culture, driving habits, the less fortunate downtown etc.), and an overall domination of obviously AI-generated Alexa-like questions followed by sus answers.

I’d scroll Lemmy by ‘new’ any day over Reddit anything, other than for local news events/stories and for sports live threads.

Yes and no. Depending on what kind of differences you care about. Want to clarify a bit?

In both, you have communities and voting sorts the posts. However, the number of communities and voters is much lower in Lemmy. Reddit has ads, so I guess that counts as a pretty clear difference too.

Mods are worse here and often will delete posts and ban users, who don’t violate the rules. There are tons of unwritten rules, especially in news and politics related topics.

If a user is banned, all their posts and the communities they created are deleted. That means lots of valuable content can get deleted at the whim of a mod.

Tankies are far more present and tolerated here than on Reddit.

Misogyny is also more ripe. There’s a reason twoxchromosomes never got off the ground here.

A similar post was created 2 weeks ago, that could provide you some answers: https://ani.social/post/6631963

Barely… many of the same fucking morons and trolls of Reddit have setup shop here, too. It’s not the cesspool that Reddit was, yet, but it’s getting there.