So, I’m going to stick with Lemmy. But I did check out Reddit the other day out of curiosity. I was disappointed/envious over the many active posts in my former favorite subreddits, and realized how much I miss that level of engagement. At the same time, I was also appalled at how terrible their mobile site is. I couldn’t even read comments because of how terribly they were displayed.

Ultimately, I’m hoping that Lemmy catches up in some capacity. I refuse to go back to Reddit, but really do want that type of community discussion again.

I have not had that experience. Reddit has more users than Lemmy, sure, but I went on Reddit literally yesterday and most of the content was trash. Lemmy has some trash, but a lot less than Reddit. A much bigger ratio of good:bad on Lemmy than Reddit has been my experience.

It's not dying. It's smaller for sure but a social network doesn't need to be big or have a ludicrous number of users to be healthy. Many of the posts I've made have gotten 10x more engagement than equivalent posts on Reddit simply because there's less for it to get lost among.

Personal opinion, but I think generally the users here are nicer and more chill than Reddit. Again, simply because the sheer number of trolls is lower and I don't think bother as much when there's less people to piss off

Reddit is certainly busier. But is it better? Every time I peek back into Reddit I'm overwhelmed by ads and karma-farming reposts. Was it always that bad, or did I just not notice when I was immersed in it? Either way, I'm happier here.

Not really I think. Lemmy losing users in a slow manner may be true (probably is, if https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats is a representative site) but Reddit thriving, I'm not so sure. I'm only seeing that Reddit is in stagnation currently and I don't mean this in a negative way, it just didn't get new followers. If someone is more active on Reddit, please educate me about your experiences, because I'm only visiting just 1 subreddit basically for some minutes and that's all.

i wouldn't know, i haven't been back to reddit

if you want a 1:1 replacement for reddit like .world seems like it wants to be, cloning the interface (https://old.lemmy.world) and the subreddits (e.g. this one) then of course you you will find it lacking, it's the same thing but with only a fraction of the users. lemmy was not made for that, it was for disgruntled communists, you are on their turf

Let me prop up my complain. I look for an English community where I can ask questions about the language, and I found one. I put several questions there and have received zero answers in span of a month. Given that it is the largest such community here, I have no options as to turn to Reddit.

I really am missing the communities for specific games.

Isn't it?

Nope.

My experience so far has been:

• "default" reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of "the algorithm" which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.

• customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I've had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.

• Lemmy... Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they're the worst things that happen there, but because they're so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don't agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you're from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you're probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the "go make your own subreddit" copout is not very practical, here "go make your own instance" seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.

That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It's even smaller and it doesn't really try to be a reddit alternative, but it's considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.