Warning: This is a rant.
I don't really know how to describe it but the content isn't quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn't quite seem as 'normal' as what I'm used to from reddit.
There's a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn't toxic.. just saying). Random conversations go into: "omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service." Then we have the 'if we don't defederate with Meta the world ends' conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse.. maybe it will make it more normalized..idk. Then the: "if your app isn't open source its awful and terrible for the world" people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn't quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn't stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn't such assholes and this whole thing didn't happen the way it did.
I'm completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that's to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don't hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
(Not OP)
I miss the Reddit that was destroyed in June. I don't miss the Reddit of now, and won't be going back. But OP is completely right on all of it. Unfortunately, we were all left scrambling for a replacement, and Lemmy has non-trivial barriers to entry for most "normal" people. Sure, those of us that are tech-savvy got through it (and are still dealing with the major bugs and deficiencies), but so much of the old experience just isn't here.
It's not the existence of shitposts and memes like 196; it's the lack of other content. r/HomeImprovement is often cited in articles about the blackout and how big/important it is. Conversely, !homeimprovement@lemmy.world is still just a fraction of the old Reddit community, and discussions are limited and (generally) disappointing. Similar stories about Woodworking, AMA, etc. LegalAdvice (for better or for worse) was one of the biggest subs on Reddit, has just 57 subs on Lemmy. The sub for my IRL city (1 million+ population), which was one of the best sources of local information, might as well not exist here.
There's no way to moderate that content into existence, and there's only so much you can contribute to that content to get it started.
To be clear, I'm not saying that OP or anyone else shouldn't miss what they had on Reddit. There are lots of things Lemmy won't replicate or explicitly can't. It was more a comment on the common complaints I see about how this community or that poster or this content is "dominating" their feed (which I discerned hints of in OP's post), when it's exceedingly easy to just remove the offending content from said feed. Will it 100% solve everyone's problems? No. But it will almost certainly improve their experience concerning those complaints.