Update, having made a new Reddit account after three years, I suddenly remember why I left. On the one hand there's way less ragebait. People actually talk about the topic of the sub and don't try to shove a mention of Trump or Palestine in at every opportunity. On the other hand it's still dangerously addictive to scroll infinitely. I'm already adding firewall rules to block reddit at night to keep me from scrolling instead of sleeping. They've also tried to make it addictive on purpose I think. I'm constantly getting notifications, by email and internally, every time a post or comment is upvoted. They have engagement analytics for every post, and encourage you to improve them by cross-posting. It seems gross and cynical, like you're not having a genuine human interaction but churning out "content" that can be monetized.

And the ads masquerade as normal posts and comments. Granted that was the case when I left, but it's worse now. I'm not a naive hippie who thinks you can run a massive online platform on sunshine and vibes. I get there are bills to pay, but surely there's a way to do that that doesn't compromise the user experience.

So I'm stuck between an awful platform with a nice community and a nice platform with a (mostly) awful community. Of course I could abandon both and stick with old school forums.

Does blocking an instance also block users from that instance or just posts from those instances showing up in my feed?

I think Reddit still has merit when it comes to niche communities

Yeah, that's probably what I miss the most. There's a sub for dogs, but also a sub for Labradors specifically. Not only that, but there's a sub each for chocolate, black, and yellow labs, and all of them are lively and active. There are active subs that spawned from inside jokes from other subs like TalesFromCaveSupport from TalesFromTechSupport. There are niches within niches within niches.

You're right. I know I'm being hypocritical, joining a platform for ideological reasons, then complaining when everyone else talks about ideology. People who join the fediverse are self-selecting.

But I actually joined Lemmy before I quit Reddit. I made an account on here during the Reddit APIcolypse of 2023, but only deleted my Reddit account that fall after realizing I was addicted to it. In some ways I was expecting a slower drip of content here on Lemmy compared to Reddit, but didn't expect the quality to be so dubious. I've been telling myself I should probably make another Reddit account. I've been having issues at work that could probably be solved with a quick post on a relevant subreddit, but I've stubbornly refused to go crawling back to the social media I swore I'd rid myself of.

I know, as do the web regular web frontends. But I can't overstate how pervasive ideology is on here. And it doesn't even show up in an organic way, either.

And here's another one. I just wanted to talk about pokemon :( Lemmings always gotta be "on".

It's probably north of the legal limit of 4 watts for CB, I'm guessing.

Do you think his opinion of them is warranted? What does the community in general think of the project.

Not yet but that was my principle reason for getting it.