Lemmy is rather small, you might be bumping into the same 3 users everywhere.

I prefer it over the reddit way, tbh. Every comment section there is just filled with gifs and jokes, and you have to scroll miles to get a reasonable and sound answer to what OP was asking. It's especially frustrating when I've searched for an issue online and reddit pops up in the search results, and all responses are just bad repetitive jokes.

Insular has such a negative connotation. I'd call it "neighborly": I like seeing the same usernames over again and getting to know their idiosyncrasies.

Hostile, I have to disagree with outright. I only have reddit and oldschool fora to compare it against, but lemmy is much friendlier than both.

Are we given to long comments? Sure. Are those comments worth reading? Usually! And that's what makes the difference.

Naa its mostly fun to me! And the people i interact with seem like good people for the most part.

I find it much more cynical than other places, probably just the nature of how everyone ended up here, jaded by the design of centralized social media.

I have to remind myself that everything isnt as 'sky is falling' as I see around these parts. Maybe I'm just blessed with a nice life, and I try not to take that for granted, but it does give me that feeling unfortunately.

I try my best to insert some humour into the headlines as some sort of way to make some light of it all, but that might just be playing into the fear and anger that I see around.

It got a lot better for me after blocking a number of communities and individual users.

No one yells at me to read the friendly manual like the arch forums. The only yelling I see is political stuff. I don't see the console flame wars. Comments don't look like youtube of the 2010s and before. Its not 4chan. It doesn't have much of the smuggery of hacker news. I can block the chapo trap house people. Fediverse and activitypub actually works and we have some admins who seem to care about informing others of bad actors either as individuals to entire instances.

Lemmy seems good to me!

At first, I was very cautious here. After Reddit, I was expecting that people would go through post histories and attack me for misunderstandings and call me an AI bot, like some users do in sites like Reddit.. But no. I haven't had any issues, even when I have put out more controversial opinions or asked dumb questions. I have gotten downvoted occasionally when I have been wrong or misunderstood, which is fair. I have gotten replies from people with different opinions, but they have been polite and sticked in the topic, which is fucking amazing. I haven't had a single even slightly unpleasant interaction so far.

Folk here have been very helpful, polite, funny or neutral. I'm actually becoming more brave at posting and commenting, and I no longer feel fearful/unpleasant when I see that I have an unread notification. Of course there are communities I have blocked or instances that I avoid but that's just to curate my feeds.

Might be the community or instance your interacting with. I've not really noticed anything like that.

Then again, I just ban anything I'm not interested in seeing.

I've felt that way since I switched to Lemmy after the Reddit API fiasco. It's kind of annoying and I'm not the biggest fan of it. But I don't feel like every interaction is this way, just way more than Reddit.

That being said, Lemmy is much better when it comes to engagement. I can post something and actually get comments, likes, and replies. On Reddit, it felt like a drop in the bucket. Half the time, you were too late to the post and it already had so many comments that yours would barely be seen by anyone.

Obviously, that didn't apply to the smaller subreddits but I like that on Lemmy I don't need to go to small niche communities just to feel like I'm part of the conversation.

The comments on this post actually made me think "Do I prefer the way Reddit was" and the answer is no. Thinking back, Reddit posts would consist of the same joke, one liner or low effort replies at the top. There was very little originality and tons of shitposting.

At the end of the day, everything has its pros and cons. Just choose the one that works best for you.

For me, that was much more of an issue on reddit.

I think this is a cool place. There are a lot of empathetic caring people that are plugged into what's going on in the world.

The downside of that is the world is a mess, to put it lightly, right now, so we're all kind of commiserating, and it is pretty serious business at the moment.

I personally haven't seen a ton of one-upping. I'm usually just happy to get a few up votes or a reply

Yes. Lemmy is extremely negative. You just get bombarded with how shit the world is constantly. It's honestly a slog being here sometimes and it pushed many people away.

I gave Lemmy another go after being gone for 2 years but I'm honestly not really having a good time lol

I had to block a lot of politics. It's not that I even disagree with what they're saying most of the time, but it's fifty extremely negative communities saying the same things over and over. It's too much.

I’m only a month in to my Lemmy journey (a few days or so of being actually active now I understand how it works) and I have so far found totally the opposite.

It’s sure a lot nicer than reddit, we can express ourselves better here without worrying about the banhammer or shit like that. Hell on Reddit I used to get permanently muted from communities just cause I said a ‘bad word’ - once was by a really good sub because I directly quoted an Australian animated skit with the word cunt in it. I’m Aussie so I’m not offended by it in the least, it’s an Aussie staple that can mean all kinds of things.

People here seem nicer, smaller community, more open for a chat, don’t have to autistically worry about someone getting offended as often. More likely to upvote comments too.

In short, fuck Reddit haha.

I can not confirm this. But depending on channel and topic, experiences can be wildly different and sometimes surprising in any direction.

Mostly not hostile, but, it’s the internet. If these were face to face conversations things would play out differently.

Granted, I’ve blocked every sub that’s consistently rabid.

I mean, Lemmy is obviously a smaller, more tight-knit community than Reddit, but I wouldn't say that it's "insular" or rejecting of many viewpoints.

I was perma-banned on Reddit for criticizing Trump and the AI industry, as well as making a jab at the horrible and inhumane Yulin Dog Meat Festival in Guangxi, China (which by the way is a 100% real thing, should be stopped, and just happens to be running right now...). So I feel that Reddit is largely in the pocket of certain groups and are willing to stretch their moderation rules to stifle certain kinds of speech that challenges their shareholders.

On top of all that, I think that the Fediverse in general is a little bit friendlier and much more real than Reddit these days, which I like. Whenever I find myself browsing Reddit (without an account) recently, it's only a matter of minutes before I come across some post or comment that is obvious bullshit, be it something clearly AI generated or just a good old fashioned lie. Reddit has really become full of nonsense and slop these days, and I think even people who continue to use Reddit are able to see that it isn't what it used to be.

Its simply the old internet: A highly autistic place filled with highly intelligent (or at least, that is what they think of themselves) people with tons of StarTrek, inside jokes and oh so much petty grudges.

As someone who was around at the time of the Usenet and the end if the BBS era I love it, but it is a bit of an acquired taste...

Some people are hostile. Don’t give them air. Just ignore them. On any platform.

No! Fuck off and leave us alone!

(Joking, it was a joke)

Everyone on every social media seems hostile these days. Maybe it's a reflection of society's anxiety?

It's the complete opposite for me. I write stupid comments all the time, never bother putting '/s' or anything and most of the time people just get it and joke along. Serious discussions are usually quite civil and interesting. Sometimes people get angry over silly things but I just ignore them.

Considering i mostly look at the meme communities on blahaj, no lol. But it also makes sense to me if youre looking at serious posts about the awful reality of our worlds current state, that the comments are going to be more serious.

Not really, it feels fine to me. A lot of thoughtful comments to be found too.