I love the communities for my hobbies. I hope they will be just as active as on reddit.

Advice on choosing between two things that are only marginally different.

Product reviews, restaurant recommendations (regional searches on Reddit for Vacationing/etc was awesome), tourist recommendations - this was the truly useful part of Reddit that will take Lemmy a very long time to catch up to.

A massive search engine registered database containing years of knowledge from millions of people. Its going to be hard to replicate that.

The smaller communities for specific interests (music genres, hobbies, etc).

Reviews and opinions. With Google results becoming worse by the hour, fake reviews flooding Amazon, paid reviews in almost every site/blog, when I'm about to purchase something I'm not 100% sure about I just search reddit to see what actual people are saying about it.

And last but not least - mostly sane discussions for news/articles with nested comments and a voting system. Lemmy already offers everything needed for that, what remains to be seen is how the community develops and grows.

Mainly news. Not just world/region but hobby news.

So far just the world/region news is here, which aren't particularly great discussions if you're trying not to get hotheaded.

Reddit was my biggest source of news. Not just because it was usually pretty up to date, but I greatly appreciated being able to check the comments as a bullshit detector. That and the article being in the comments instead of news sites' paywalls.

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

A false sense of not being alone.

Reddit was nice because I could Google something like "best beginner DSLR camera" and I only got ai generated articles on the newest most expensive cameras, but I could search "best beginner DSLR camera reddit" and actually get good options.

Diversity and exposure to new ideas.

Whether I agree with the idea or not, breing exposed to so many different points of view changes how I look at various topics. Sometimes it reinforces and strengthens my position and sometimes I change my stance.

I feel like Reddit (and now Lemmy) allow me to engage / listen to discussions on an issue. Discussions that involve a wide assortment of different viewpoints. It's hard to find that in most places on the internet.

I am looking for curation and durable content here.

For me, Reddit was a curated source of information. You have these communities full of knowledgeable people. If you went into that community you'd either find the info you need, already asked and answered, or you could ask and get a good answer. Discord is just real-time chat. It has virtually no search engine find-ability, no categorising, tagging, or reasonable way to go back and find something someone asked a year ago that was answered perfectly. Many of the social media are really personal and 'now' oriented. I'm eating a donut. This person pissed me off. I'm getting married, etc. Video streaming platforms have individual creators, who often have a theme, but they don't have communities or top-down categorisation. And video sucks as a searchable archive. It's really hard to know that 17 minutes into this video with a clickbait title, there's a really useful nugget of information. But Reddit (and now its federated clones) is user-curated and categorised. If I jump into a Windows-oriented community, I won't find a bunch of Linux stuff. If I want to look at a sport or a hobby or politics, there's a place to go. But it's not one creator/curator. It's organic.

I was mostly on reddit for the information I got from the niche communities I joined. Posts regarding GPU passthrough for virtual machines, the configurations people used, problem solving for those virtual machines, I loved all of it. I only lurked though, very very rarely did I even comment, on here I'm trying to be more active. I'm hoping that as communities grow, I can get the same information I got from the reddit subs I lurked on

I'm looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I'd like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with "I also choose this guy's dead wife" or "not my proudest fap" because it's a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.

So far Lemmy is delivering and so I'm engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.

Reddit and it's users are good at hyperfixating on a topic and building a community around said topic, with different skill levels. Therefore if you want to also participate, you can simply look up a subreddit for that topic and nearly instantly get answers to your questions and tips on how to start.

It was porn. All porn. All my interests, all in a multi Reddit.

One second I’m a big adult doing very responsible reading news things.

The next am goon.

In the twilight years I mostly just used Reddit as an information aggregate.

I'm primarily wanting a place where I can read information for both niche and general topics, as well as read the dissent to that information in the same space.

Maybe I become more engaged in the community. But going from:

Private forums > old reddit > new reddit

Each step felt like I knew and was known by fewer people. All while knowing less about the people I did recognise. I spent a lot of time in "off topic" sections of the private forums, commented and generated a fair amount on old Reddit, and mostly lurked on new Reddit.

I think the whole situation has me cynical about the idea of "internet community", and maybe that's something I need to work on.

At first, it was dank memes, public freakouts, instant karma, but as time went on, I detoxified my feed/subs to only include things like mademesmile, animalsbeingbros, bettereveryloop, etc.

I hope to see active communities for finance, international travel, and hopefully u/rusticgorilla will mirror r/Keep_Track here too.

No longer the case on current day reddit, but in the past in the news subreddits, when an article was clickbait one of the top comments would usually point out that it was click bait and why. And that made reddit for me a very useful source to get news from all over the world because it was easy to skip through the biased/clickbait articles.

Then also the specific gaming communities. Lemmy is far to small to have a community for every single game so that's a big loss for me.

Niche communities are what made Reddit fun/useful to me. It was really nice to have discourse with a community that liked the same video game, movie, hobby, political ideals, etc, that you did.

Guides and tutorials were the other big thing. I utilized and contributed guides on Reddit regularly. It was really nice to engage with a community to solve an issue rather than use some AI generated or ad ridden article.

I hope to see Lemmy fill these gaps and it seems it has the potential to do so.

Quick responses to oddly specific questions in niche communities.

Users aggregating links on a specific topic like buildapcsales and gundeals from reddit.

I mostly used it for extremely specific obscure tech issues that were solved 10 years ago in random threads 🙃

• Distraction

• Discussion

What was good about reddit is that the front page could be interacted with as a quick way to burn some downtime and distract your eyeballs with cute cats or "holdmy____", or it could be interacted with as a series of rabbit holes that could easily eat up hours of time.

Beyond interacting with content, the discussion around the content was the thing that kept me coming back for 10 years, even after I abandoned Twitter and Facebook years ago.

So far, the fediverse seems like a throwback and an innovation at the same time, and I mean that in the best possible sense.

I just like a 'digital public square' aspect. I want to see what people are interested in today. I want to catch up on the latest news. Maybe I want to learn something new in a hobby community.

Reddit was okay at that at first, but it did start to feel 'gamed' over a decade ago now. People were starting to notice common reposters, 'super users', and its only devolved from there with sponsored posts, awards, and advertisements. That takes away from the public square aspect and instead makes it feel like you are consuming a product.

My most productive usage of Reddit was as a fast, easy way to find good information on pretty much any subject - at least as a starting point. Anything from home DIY stuff, to building a PC, to self-help and fashion advice

It would be wonderful to have a version of Reddit that didn't have a crazy profit motive and was focused on the users.

Loved being able to find niche interests having a supportive group around the niche.

I loved being able to find a collection of knowledge in a single space.

And really, just being able to have decent conversations with randos over things I would have a hard time finding people to talk to in person about. I like to explore controversial topics and opinions (the ones not based in stupid at least) and I either don't know the right kind of people in my day to day life, or I want to be able to talk without worrying about it impacting my job and day to day life. I try not to be an asshole or anything like that, but sometimes I have and unpopular opinion and need to be able to discuss it with people more knowledgeable on the topic before I change my opinions or sometimes fully understand what my opinion is. I like that discourse.

The subreddit sidebars were a treasure trove of great starting information on almost any topic. It was always my first stopping point when wanting to learn something new, travel to a new place or start a new hobby. It was legitimate helpful information that wasn’t trying to promote or sell anything. I hope to find that here.

Rebbit was great for troubleshooting tech issues. Subreddits like r/thinkpad r/linux r/homelab etc were very useful it figuring out weird tech issues when google finds nothing useful.

firstly: actual information that isn't a slurry of AI-generated buzzword SEO designed to get you to click an ad; real experiences from other people, real answers to questions.

secondly: participating in specific hobby communities.

thirdly: a place to go when my brain turns off and my fingers just type an address into the URL bar and hit enter.

I liked the positivity of the community for the most part. Reddit, to my mind, was the only largely non toxic form of social media and that will be hard to replace though I’m liking Lemmy so far.

I always liked getting into micro communities and hearing how they talked about their worlds. That might include life in obscure (relative to me) places around the world, getting into the weeds of various occupations I’ll never work in or learning about the fine details of hobbies I’ll never have. Real people having good faith conversations about highly specific things relevant to them.

Selfishly - A place to essentially have content delivered in an easy to find/use format 24/7.

Less Selfishly - A place to take part in discussions on shared interests & hobbies.

Unrealistically - A Reddit-like archive of posts to help in troubleshooting or recommending things. Pretty much impossible to replicate what Reddit has at the moment, and, if I understand how Lemmy works well enough atm, not something that's going to happen on Lemmy.

After college, my reddit was mostly used to keep up with product reviews (especially in terms of durability), tech news, and biomed research, and a lot of times I got guidance on hyperspecific issues from a lot of the professionals in those communities.

Also have to give a huge shoutout to r/resumes and the other large jobhunting subreddits-- I don't think I'd have found a job at all if it weren't for their megathreads and resources

I guess I'll be the piece of shit who says porn lol

I'm hoping some good ole fashioned porn gifs make it over here in some capacity.

1. Tech support that isn't an advert (Reddit was a goldmine for more interesting hardware)

2. Cool stats/maths things to share with my students

3. Snek and Fox pictures to get me through my marking sane(ish)

Ironically Reddit mostly became a “filter google bullshit response” site. I miss the community stuff from Reddit of 5 years ago, I think Lemmy is heading in a good direction.

I primarily used Reddit to get involved in niche hobbies/interests and learn more about them. After seeing a lot of my favourite communities jumping ship, I thought I’d jump too!

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

It was a huge source of troubleshooting and solving really niche problems. Lots of people know about appending site: reddit to Google searches as a result.

definitely the niche and obscur advices. The parenting communities !

I use Reddit for 2 main purposes. As a distraction with a diverse home page curated to my interests: It was nice to scroll through and have a mixture of memes, art, text posts and news all in one place mixed together. Secondly if you want advice for a hobby/interest there is usually a subreddit for it where you can have a decent discussion.

I've spent a small amount of time on here an kbin so far and both look pretty promising (especially since they should have the same content once the federation on kbin is sorted), if they're active enough I can see one of them mostly replacing Reddit for me even if I'm not sure the main userbase will ever switch. The main thing I'm waiting for now is a decent iOS app, I'll probably use whichever platform gets one first!

I loved the writing subs. Reading short stories and encouraging eachother to grow.