On a large subreddit with more than 100K users, it’s an unspoken rule that if a thread has more than 200 comments, don’t bother making a new comment because it will get buried by the default comment ranking and no one will interact with it. Nobody uses the “new” ranking because you’re only going to see the meaningless one-sentence comments from people who don’t care about visibility. Only reply to the top comments in the thread after that point if you want to have a discussion.
I really appreciate that Lemmy’s default comment ranking lets the most upvoted comments fall off the top of the thread after a while so that newer comments appear at the top instead. It prevents threads from looking like circlejerks where all of the top comments agree with each other and encourages people to add their thoughts in a new comment instead of dogpiling on the top comment. This combined with disabling the global karma count is what improves the discussion experience from Reddit most, in my opinion.
What I don’t like about Lemmy so far is the auto-update feature of the feed. I’d like to browse my federated Feed, sorted by “Hot”. But after a minute or so, it gets updated and lots of new posts replace the ones I was just looking at.
Even worse, sometimes these are just completely new posts, all from one instance that apparently just got indexed.
This is something that is actively being worked on fyi :) Hopefully it’s fixed soon. I think it’s just a relic from when these servers were a lot less populated.
This is what i love about FOSS <3
Keep in mind that you don’t have to use Lemmy - kbin works as well with the same communities.
I’ve been using both, but my point is, it’s nice to have options.