New here. Migrated from Reddit. Still trying to figure out Lemmy - what’s everyone’s experiences like coming from Reddit and does Lemmy serve as a good alternative? Pros and cons/differences?
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks. I mostly followed music pages like r/TheBeatles and loved to just rant about Beatles albums, Paul McCartney’s latest tour, discuss new releases from other artists and also movies/TV shows. I can’t think of any other website that offers that kind of forum-like discussion other than Lemmy?
I really did always hate that Reddit felt like a massive echo chamber. The way the system works with upvotes and downvotes, if I said anything people don’t agree with, I’d get massively downvoted. I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom… it really felt like I was treading on egg shells. My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song. Really petty.
I’ve always hoped somebody would create basically a clone of Reddit, but without the politics and without being overly-policed. Where people aren’t pushed away for respectfully voicing their opinion. Is Lemmy the answer?
Lemmy is a collection of independent echo chambers that believe different things. You can make an account on some instance you never heard of before and get people assuming you have certain beliefs just because of your instance because apparently a lot of people stick primary to their home instance? In one instance, you have an echo chamber of “bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE” and other echo chambers that say things like “I won’t vote for someone who aids in genocide”.
Some instances block more instances than others (the one you are on has blocked 172 instances, for example). And some instances are blocked by a lot of instances (lemmygrad is blocked by 89 instances). Also some instances disable downvoting, if that’s something you’re interested in.
I don’t think overpolicing is an issue in most places? Like, there’s that one person who openly is pro-genocide in all of the palestine-related threads (like, they explicitly call for killing of even infants and that anything less is antisemitism) and I guess they’re tolerated (just probably one of the most heavily downvoted people on lemmy). But if they’re on an instance without downvotes, they wouldn’t even see them.