Warning: This is a rant.
I don't really know how to describe it but the content isn't quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn't quite seem as 'normal' as what I'm used to from reddit.
There's a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn't toxic.. just saying). Random conversations go into: "omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service." Then we have the 'if we don't defederate with Meta the world ends' conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse.. maybe it will make it more normalized..idk. Then the: "if your app isn't open source its awful and terrible for the world" people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn't quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn't stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn't such assholes and this whole thing didn't happen the way it did.
I'm completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that's to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don't hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
I think the culture is different here for a few reasons. I checked out lemmy a few years ago when I saw a hacker news post about it, back then it was almost entirely technical people who were entirely opposed to corporate social media, and a lot of tin foil hat type privacy discussions. On top of that, if you look at a lot of the older instances like lemmy.ml and hexbear.net you'll find a lot of tanky communities that were displaced by corporate social media. These older and more established subcultures are probably shaping the culture to this day. I think their influence will fade as the fediverse becomes more popular.
Second, the threads thing is the Big Event on the fediverse right now, and everyone is talking about it. I addition to the groups I mentioned earlier, a ton of the lemmy user base just came from reddit, and I can't even count how many "fuck meta because privacy etc." conversations I've seen there. This is the same way everyone was talking about the reddit migration to lemmy constantly a few weeks ago and filling up the front page. This will probably blow over in a week or two. Reddit has stuff like this happening all the time as well.
Third, I I'd say lemmy and the broader fediverse is self selecting for the more tin foil hat privacy obsessed types due to the barrier for account creation being higher. Why wouldn't someone choose the more popular, more reliable, easier to on-board app if they don't care about privacy? The API changes were definitely handled really poorly, but a drop in content quality from poor moderation still remains to be seen. The subs I was frequenting definitely became less active as the protest dragged on, but a lot of them were open source focused communities. I don't think everyone has noticed the same change I have. Most people on reddit don't really care about it's drama.