Exactly what the title says.
What has your experience been on any of those platforms? Which captures more of your time? Why?
I’m relatively new here but I’ve read a little on the reddit-like platforms. I (mostly) understand what’s a fork of what or what some of the technical differences are, but I’m curious about the vibes and communities.
I only have experience with Lemmy, it’s kinda my daily driver for social media. It functions well, I enjoy my instance and the admins there.
The political rhetoric can be a little exhausting, especially with it being election year. The culture clashes between different instances can cause friction.
Example, this is on Lemmy.ml, and I think the admin and moderation policies on .ml are patently absurd. They also have a bot that auto edits comments to remove no no words, which is… well stupid. I would not be surprised if this comment gets removed for the above remarks.
But that’s what’s nice, Lemmy.ml admins can’t ban me from Lemmy, only .ml, and if I don’t want to deal with .ml anymore I can just block the instance. We surpassed them in MAU anyway. My instance doesn’t defederate on ideological or political lines so I have that option.
So, overall I’m enjoying myself. I’m concerned about the longevity of the platform and the extremity of political rhetoric that has to permeate every single post, but I’m hoping that dies down as Lemmy Balkanizes. That’s already started with hexbear defederating from lots of instances.
This is the one saving grace of Lemmy that saves it from just being a more overcomplicated reddit. I’ve probably caught the most bans on the entire federation because I don’t mince words and being openly left-of-hitler makes me a threat to people who don’t want to admit they’re fascists. All of that and I get to continue posting because the gaps are filled by more reasonable comms and instances who don’t do that.
For the first time on the internet I feel like I can just be myself and not get punished for it. I don’t have to pretend to be someone i’m not. It does have a bit of a cultural rot problem (don’t bring up pedophilia, Ukraine or veganism if you value your sanity) but I don’t see that as being a permanent thing, more a consequence of people coming in from reddit. Once the federation matures a bit that sorta thing should dip down.