Eh, it scratches the itch. I don’t touch reddit anymore, outside of web searches. Still, I miss the niche communities that only a massive site like reddit can give life.

So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).

This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.

I’m struggling to find niche communities but overall the comments are more human and not just saying what everyone wants to hear for Internet points. I still plan on hosting my own instance soon and I’m excited for that. I do find it annoying as well when I sort by new and it’s just thousands of repost from reddit.

It depends. I’m on two instances, sopuli and beehaw. Both of them are really welcoming and cool, and I can interact with people without worrying about being bullied or harassed or attacked by random trolls just because they don’t like what I say (and trust me, suffering those actions while being neurodivergent is way worse than suffering those actions while being neurotypical).

But I think that more than 70% of the content I see comes from one single instance. Excluding beehaw (they defederated that other instance, and I agree with that), I think that sopuli also has similar communities that are like abandoned or with low amount of content. That’s something I don’t like.

The only thing I miss from reddit is the ability to use lemmy as a supplement to stack overflow. I still use teddit to occasionally find old posts on places like r/learnprogramming

I’m a junior web dev so I still benefit from old posts that answer basic questions, but I do wish I could just do a ddg lite search and be able to type in ‘lemmy’ and get the answer to my question.

Otherwise there’s just certain subreddits I wish there was a corresponding community here on Lemmy like specific Indie Video Games. These are small issues and I hope Lemmy popularity grows. Not just for my personal wants, but just cuz I like decentralized alternatives as their simply more authentic imho.