New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what's everyone's experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 "controversial" comment and I got perma-banned... this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney's latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can't think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don't agree with, I'd get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom... it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.
I've always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren't pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
Lemmy is smaller and more... particular. Users here are more respectful, and more sensitive. Politics seem to bleed into everything more than at reddit. Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber, but of a different flavor. More "kill the rich" and less " the narwhal bacon's at midnight"
You can still get nuked arbitrarily for annoying a mod.
I say try it out, but use the ban tool liberally the first few weeks. Block instances like hexbear, lemmygrad and possibly ml if you aren't interested in leftist discussion, and in for former instance's cases, trolling and dogpilling. (Or keep em, if you like that 😁)
After a few weeks of banning users and instances I have a generally palatable but still pretty left leaning time-dump / memefeed.
Yeah blocking users is pretty useful. Whenever I see a user post something horrible or massively annoying I look at their last few comments. Usually those are equally bad so then I block them and go back to whatever I was looking at.
So you created an echo chamber more familiar to what you know? I get lemmygrad and hexbear isn't for everyone but don't see a reason to ban. Lemmy.ml existed before the influx so has a mix and shouldn't be generalised.