New-ish (I joined during the reddit hooplah a while back) and my experience has been hit or miss.

I'm on my third instance. First I joined lem.ee and that got shut down. Then I joined midwest.social because I thought hey I'm a Midwest leftist, but that instance has been slow as shit and never loads for me. Tried on multiple lemmy clients with the same result. So now here I am on lemmy.world.

Federation is a good concept but I don't think it will ever catch on on a large scale. It's just too user-unfriendly.

I'm a redfugee came with the big exit about a year ago. I post prolificaly, comment sporadically and have a couple of comms. I love it, it feels more like the olden days of the Internet when everything was smaller and you knew people. I sometimes idly scroll Reddit but not even once a week, it's fucking dire and atmosphere is shit. Insta I'm on a few times a day for memes and Reels.

Long live the fediverse!

came last april ish after a reddit purge, was on another instance before it was shutdown forever. there has been less content though. and i dont like the tankie, or anything related to "tankie politics"

That we still can't use a single account to comment and post outside of our home instance is the most frustrating part of the fediverse and the main contradiction to "you just need one sign up".

I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you're part of a large community, there's no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it's nice.

I'm absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don't actually use it much. Didn't use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?

how has your experience been?

Posts and comments cannot be easily deleted, for one.

Otherwise, the general experience is like being at an anarchists' beer hall. Where there's constant talk of revolution and expressing hatred of various enemies, but only a few actually taking to the streets.

Hi & welcome to all new users.

If you feel intimidated or jarred, it's normal. Just keep in mind it's OK make mistakes while trying new things out. There is only very kind moderators around here, well, a few are nice ;)

Don't be afraid to ask questions about anything you find confusing (there are quite a few, to be honest).

And to those that have been here for a while, how has your experience changed over the year(s)?

1. I stopped worrying about the few things I did not like and focus my attention on what I think is great around here.
2. I learned to filter the default feed by showing only 'Subscribed' and learned to use keywords to filter out the many types of content I have zero interest in. It instantly made the experience much better.

couple months, its pretty ok.

id like more users, but thats about it.

I have been using Lemmy for about 6 months and truth be had I am still really completely lost on the structure.

But that really doesn’t matter. I have found the communities (I thought they were called instances) that have the content I enjoy and they are reasonably active.

That is has been the biggest surprise for me, so many communities are completely dead. There is one movie community. Whose last post was 1.5 years ago.

I think the strength of the federated model also works against it. It really delutes the community’s content.

Also Lemmy is a total dead zone for any sports discussion. I have discovered an NFL community that seems active but I found it at the end of those year’s season.

I cannot use it, want to get rid of Reddit but this feels and acts like a site from 1980s , navigation and jumping off from one part to another is cumbersome at best and unknown at worst. What is difference between this and what I get in boost app is unknown.

Threads is a Facebook thing and I stay away. The tiny corner of Mastodon that I look at is pretty good. Lemmy, well I'm here and it's not totally bad, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Too much duplication, too much clickbait, and believe it or not too much centralization. For example, your reading history is store on the server instead of the client.

Kinda shit, actually. It's mostly just reddit reposts, nazi bot reposts, and furry porn.