I prefer kbin as well, but I’m fine with colloquially lumping it all under “Lemmy” at the moment. It’s weird to wrap your head around the fact that all the different platforms can talk to each other, not just instances of the same platform.
People use the email metaphor a lot, but it’s sort of incomplete. It’s kind of like if, in addition to having different email providers, a few other communication services were built on email too (like instant messaging) and had varying levels of interoperability between email clients and chat clients. If “Lemmy” is the “Kleenex” of Reddit-like ActivityPub implementations, then so be it, IMO.
It’s better than nothing, but it’s a major downgrade. Politics is even more one-sided and harder to avoid; the entire website is an echo chamber. Many communities lack population, and Lemmy’s sorting algorithms suck.
You only ever see posts about people who are happy with the switch, but I have a hard time believing most people actually feel that way. The ones who are disappointed probably just don’t get upvoted.
Strangely because everything shows up on All, I feel like I see slightly less echo chamber. Or at least many “controversial” topics have at least 2 contrarian posts that do NOT get buried like that would on Reddit. Or maybe it’s just the tankies.
I like that profiles do not show the total karma count. I feel like that just incentivises mindless posting just to get that counter up (some people love seeing their numbers going up).
I don’t think the “hot” sorting algorithm is very good yet. A lot of old posts were showing up (haven’t seen those lately, maybe it has been fixed), but the algorithm is still not great.
Would be nice to auto hide posts that I already upvoted or downvoted. That option exists on Reddit
Amount of content in the form of posted items I think is good. But the lack of comments/discussion is disappointing at times. That being said, I do not miss the lack of useless comments like “first”, or ones that were just “r/relatedsub”, etc.
I think the proportion of extreme positions is higher on lemmy than Reddit. I agree with the tankie and commie assessment, but would add technology and FOSS zealots to the list, probably with a few more. I've commented a little bit here and there, but there other times where I start writing a comment, and go no, I don't need to read ten replies from ideological hardliners.
I remember commenting on a thread about why the general public doesn't take the time to learn Linux. I gave my best analogy that people just want to drive a computer like a car and not look under the hood, and I swear an army of willfully ignorant FOSS purists came out of the woodwork.
It's exhausting dealing with zealots of any sort, whether you're taking economics, public policy, tech, etc.
Not OP but it seems like there are a small handful of topics that make it to the front page:
Memes, especially old ones
Linux/FOSS because Google/Windows is stealing my data
general news, especially Trump
ich_iel
But there aren’t nearly as many smaller communities for asking questions about niche things, like sublemmys for the city you currently live in, or sublemmys for your favorite indie video game. Questions can’t really be asked because there aren’t enough people who’ve played the game to answer. I haven’t even found a list of my subscribed communities on Kbin, so I tend to browse the front page which tends to be one of the above 4 things.
While there is a slow, but steady, stream of interesting topics, the number of responses is typically in the 10s (at most) rather than hundreds or thousands. Often its just 0. And the quality of the responses is still lacking mostly, although some of the tech channels I follow usually have one or two people with good knowledge.
Plus… waaaay too many old memes. (Yeah… I know I can block them, but I do like living dangerously and browsing all sometimes to look for interesting channels)
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