Was originally thinking of posting Lenmy content on Reddit to less directly advertise Lemmy, but in the communities I follow, its almost exclusively content or already posted to, or directly originating from Reddit. This got me wondering if there were any niches that Lemmy serves better than other, larger platforms.
Oh, hell yeah.
The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.
The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.
Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.
Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.
I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.
That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.