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

Much more politics, much more to the left, most people seem to actively look for reasons to get offended.

Really community dependent.

!casualconversation@lemm.ee is well, casual.

Of course politics and news communities are something else.

They are pretty much the same people, with the communities being split a bit differently. People on Lemmy tend to think “they are different”.

I haven’t been on reddit since rif stopped working , so I’m comparing to those years and before. There’s just as much bigotry, ad hominems and unnecessary fighting/arguing.

Edit: aside from all the lemmy porn, i never blocked subs or filtered words on either platform. People will do that heavily and have their own little view of lemmy/reddit

Before 2024 it felt like an old school forum.

After that and the election cycle, feels more like Reddit in 2018

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.

People are usually a lot less toxic here, conversations are more civil.

A greater percentage of more mature users, many of whom don’t want to see Lemmy turn into the cesspool that reddit has become

Well there’s certainly a lot more tankies here, or at least more visible.

Other than that, I usually say Lemmy feels like Reddit of like 15 years ago, which isn’t a bad thing

Is least compared to where I spent my time on Reddit before the api was removed, I’ve actually found Lemmy far more hostile. On Reddit, I found discussion fairly light-hearted with even more divisive discussions generally given the benifit of the doubt. On Lemmy, on the other hand, I can make a relatively uncontroversial statement like, “Steam provides useful tools.” and be called a fanboy shill who supports fascists.

Lemmy is a lot “bubblier” than Reddit, I suspect because the communities are smaller. It’s a lot easier for a community to have a preferred view on things, even things you wouldn’t suspect were part of the community’s theme, and if you take the wrong position you’ll get pummeled with downvotes more easily.

Not that it doesn’t happen on Reddit too, but I see it far more here on Lemmy. I’m still active on both and while I haven’t done any formal comparison you’re asking how it “feels” and that’s definitely how it feels. I speak my mind freely on both platforms but on this one I’m more likely to see a pile of downvotes.

There’s not as many comments. That’s pretty much the only difference between Lemmy and Reddit

It’s like Reddit from 18 years ago, if everyone then had kept expecting it to work like Reddit from 18 months ago.

Early Reddit had no subreddits, and then it just had a handful of major ones—it wasn’t until it got a much larger user base that all the thousands of niche subreddits became viable. (There were still plenty of conversations about niche topics—they just didn’t have dedicated forums with the associated infrastructure.) But ex-redditors on lemmy expect those fine-grained niche communities to work right from the start, before there are enough users to keep them all active.

I’m lurking more, interacting less. But, seems to be a lot less recycled snark and bot activity here. But after reading some other comments, maybe my experience here is still a bit limited.

I’ll take a qed here…dogpiling on lemmy is an addiction, and there’s a fair degree of ‘stalking’.
Both are tiring.

If a post or comment gets to ‘-1’, there is virtually no recovery. Stalking simplifies this endeavour.