Personally, I was surprised that you get as much help – and frequently even more – in channels that are like 1% of the corresponding reddit ones.

I think the reason is that total numbers mean little, and your ratio of reading-to-responding matters the most. If you’re surrounded by people who like to help each other, then they can easily process and actually read all new posts, and reply to newbies. If you’re surrounded by people who just like to skim through and not dive in to the actual question/post, you get brainless upvotes/downvotes and of course frustration.

For me, lemmy is not flawless, but it’s pretty good.

UPDATE: be careful to not over-read simply “Local” news, but stay on the topics that interest you though. Otherwise, you may get overwhelmed by bots or propaganda, which also exists here. E.g. you read your stuff and then suddenly encounter “Russia Today” and such? Block both the author and the channel immediately. I’d recommend that at least - your choice ofc.

I’ve found that the other replies don’t really express my personal take on this, so I’ll go ahead and write mine down.

First of all, and it’s important, people’s take on such topics is heavily dependent on the country they live in. It’s legitimately hard to imagine why you would want to break government rules hard and be a good person if you live somewhere in Norway. And it’s legitimately hard to imagine a world where you really trust your government and think that the current levels of censorship is actually good if you live in a dictatorship country.

With this in mind, a comfortable and universal level of censorship simply doesn’t exist.

I think the lack of Tor support is valid criticism if you’re in a dictatorship. Of course, DNS-based solutions are not good-enough for you. I hope you’ll find something that solves your problems. Unfortunately a simple Lemmy instance is not a solution for you.

Generally, if I’d advise something, I’d suggest to look at what the project actually aims to do, not at what you think it should be doing. E.g. visit https://join-lemmy.org/ and there it says:

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking,…

Well, does it sound like a solution made for people in heavily censored environments? To me – not. If you want to present your case and incentivize the Lemmy devs to ADD another perspective or direction to the software that they’re spending time developing, prepare your case and argumentation well. Explain your situation (e.g. “I’ll be hung if I speak freely where I live”, or more relevant, “my country heavily DNS-censors 90% of the good existing Lemmy instances, I’m deprived of good information you have circling here”), propose some solutions or offer help. I don’t know really. It’s up to you. Good luck with your seach

I think/hope it was a joke.

But none that I’d like or find healthy, to be honest.

I confirm, I’ve personally edited a post 3 times over until a day later I’ve understood what’s exactly happening: https://lemmy.ml/post/37434570

You’re kind of proving my point right now, this comment and the downvotes above.

I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

Oh, I forgot one thing on the downsides. The onboarding captcha-like thingy on the lemmy.ml instance is quite elaborate where you have to quote some text from a Communism book. Instances like Memes are rich with upvotes and glorification of Stalin and of the Soviet Union. While I do agree on many of the downsides of for-profit culture (as you can see in my comment above for example), here it’s just extreme levels in my opinion. I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

That’s the other downside. I still use Lemmy as you see, but I felt it’s fair to share a negative point even if the overall conclusion is positive.

Good day! I’m here for ~2 months probably.

• Something that I like better here, is the higher average level of thought put in the comments. Fewer dismissive one-liners, fever thoughts that seem to start and end within a single second. That does not go for all communities, but I’ve received some great help when I posted some questions, and posts where I shared info got valuable comments too. Reddit can also be good for this - but sometimes not exactly on par to the quality level.

• Another plus, and that’s obvious, Lemmy is a free platform where you know you won’t be cut away, or have to tolerate a bad UI with animations and opening treasure chests because the for-profit core of the business thinks it’ll sell well. (The legal goal of any Reddit emloyee is to maximize company’s profits. Not satisfy user’s needs. Only in the places where these two coincide you get something.)

• I miss certain specific communities.

• Also the feel of it sometimes: 9x% of all communities here are unofficial of course. And migrating your community here might be scary, of course, because the total number of Redditors is magnitudes higher (these redditors are not all in YOUR community, but the lizard brain is nevertheless afraid of such commitments).

• A bit of both, different and the same. I think the people and their motivations are a lil bit different, and you can feel it. But it’s still also people. Having their jobs, doing things for fun or out of boredom, etc etc. So also the same in a way.

Perhaps a wrapping thought. For my posts and comments personally, I’ve felt that communities here are larger than what I thought they would be based on numbers. You do get responses and help even in smaller communities. Maybe it’s a phenomena that for a smaller group, the noise levels are lower, so more people can survive the noise and continue reading besides “best of the month” filters. So they would go on and respond to something that would otherwise be filtered out as overwhelming.
Dunno.
Onboard and tell us how it feels later ;-)

Personally I bookmark the last read post, and upon reading, bookmark the new one and unbookmark the old.

A feature from RSS readers known as grouping, where instead of a wall of posts you could see an overview:

Mechanical Keyboards (5)
Lemmy (3)
Not Just Bikes (2)
Another Community (7)
Some Community (1)
…
…

For each community you see the number of unreads. If you click on one of these entries, you get the posts of that community of course, ideally being able to set up a “read” marker that “I’ve read until this post here”.

One practical idea to not require API changes for this feature could be to use bookmarks as read indicators. It’s more in the “quick and dirty” realm of course…

I disagree with the strong sentiment in most other comments. It’s not a total crime to cross-post individual things manually. For example, I’ve recently de-facto cross-posted this, and it was fine: https://lemmy.ml/post/37434570

That being said, I would absolutely not automate such stuff. I think having to do it manually is a good barrier so that you’d post truly interesting to you stuff, and skip the rest. I wouldn’t even participate or encourage software that tries to automate this.