I was on Reddit for ten years, about a million karma between a few accounts. The day Reddit Is Fun stopped working I had already deleted my accounts and all of that content earlier in the week. Google searches have brought me back for a few minutes but I'm out.
It doesn't matter how many people or what kind of people moved from Reddit. I was there 14 years (Digg 4.0 exile here). They have a new group of people now. My wife and kids now use Reddit, but it's not the same type of user interaction I experienced there in the past. It's very much a mix of scrolling through TikTok videos and sparse reading of comments on an /r/askreddit thread. It's casual browsing and video content. There are still some holdouts, which I think mostly contribute to what's left of the comment section, but that's it. It sucks, because I miss the discussions there. Lemmy kind of scratches that itch, but the content is slow to come in, and the comments so few. I'm doing my part, and I am much more active here than I ever was on Reddit.
IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It's shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don't really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.
I get better responses here on Lemmy with my longer replies, which is great. Reddit feels overall dumber now where people will try and argue that your comment with sources is somehow less compelling than someone else’s sourceless opinion (true story).
My favorite thing about Lemmy is that you can comment on an article that's several hours old and get responses. Reddit was so big that if you didn't comment on major articles within a couple minutes of being posted, your comment would get buried under a thousand other comments and would never be seen. Commenting became a game of which top level comment you could possibly sneak your comment as a response to, even if it wasn't really a "response" to what the person had said, just to get your comment seen and have a chance at sparking a discussion.
I've had the same experiences actually. It's also a lot more common (at least from what I've experienced) to find people being more composed here even in the face of some divisive or provocative content.
Honestly, the worst thing about Lemmy is Lemmy users thinking it's better than Reddit simply by the virtue of it not being Reddit.
The platform? Yes, absolutely, a much better solution with built in checks and balances to stop one greedy company eating everyone's lunch.
The content? It's identical! (Bar a few cosplay communists that stir up drama occasionally). And some things are significantly worse like the quality of content curation and moderation.
For every person writing an "ugh you must be a Redditor"/"I thought I left this behind on Reddit" type comment,I bet there are many more people rolling their eyes and at least a few of them that end up abandoning the platform entirely.
Also let's not forget that Reddit has duration as an advantage. I can look back 10 years on a tv show that is no longer airing and there will still be discussion threads from when it came out. That's literally impossible to manufacture overnight, so Reddit has a huge edge.
