Just checking the place out after not being able to stand Reddit and its policies anymore. Their policing of Luigi posts was the last straw for me.
Going public ruins companies.
If your experience is like mine when I ditched reddit, it’ll take a few months for the learned defensiveness and self-editing to wear off. People seem more mature here (except for our sense of humor) and I’ve found less trolling and sealioning.
The interface quality is down, but the quality of content is way, way up. It more than makes up the difference.
It's really hard for openly reactionary communities to get a hold here, because rather than being given free reign by fiat, they get defedded. The reactionaries are definitely here, and lemmy.world among other open instsnces are a bit of a haven for them, but even lemmy.world has to make concessions to the fact that if they become too much of a shithole then the other instances will make alternatives and render them irrelevant.
It turns out that without a big daddy institution to shelter them, reactionaries don't thrive, their communities can't metastisise, and they are super unpopular. That's the big difference.
I think I've blocked like one or two obvious trolls in my time here, and it's been relatively peaceful. I haven't felt any need to block people for the most part.
Most of the people I blocked were heavy participants in hexbear and it was before instance blocking was exposed for users. But I agree, its pretty chill compared to Reddit. Although its way less friendly than Mastadon, so lately I've been a lot more active on Mastadon
It feels like we are more the early adopter tech savvy redditors though. As user ~2000 of Reddit, Lemmy feels very much like Reddit did prior to the Digg migration (after which things seemed to dumb down considerably).
I’d say people are very defensive and aggressive still but the filters and blocking helps me a lot. Though I’ve been sassy I do want to try to make a better nicer place