Reddit

as someone who just abandoned their decade old reddit account, I feel like the primary difference is exactly what it seems like it would be: the giant userbase. Don't let's bullshit, social media is a skinner box. It's a place where you can press a button and get a quick hit of some sort of shallow social interaction. Whether it's approval via an updoot, a comment, or even just someone trolling, every time i hit the button I get a little reward center stimulation. It's not there with lemmy, yet. Federation is dope inasmuch as I can simply choose not to interact with huge swaths of the population that, in a centralized service, are just always there like seagulls on the shore, hollering and shitting all over everything. I love that part. But that also means that when I have a few seconds to kill and am looking for a quick pop of social media dopamine, I load up lemmy and the same posts are on the front page that have been there for two days now. This will improve a bit as there are more users and more communities within a few given instances, but for the most part right now Lemmy feels like a "once every couple of days" thing whereas reddit was generating (admittedly shit) content as fast as I could consume it.