Reddit

Yes, it is a good alternative IF you take part. Don't be a lurker, post stuff, cause friction, create interesting discussion even if you know you may get downvoted for bringing up things people don't want to talk about. Reddit is a censored pile of gatekept shit, don't ever waste your time commenting on there.

I’m also super new here because I keep getting banned there. I’ve been told I was a bigot because I was against the Palestinian genocide. Like what?! And I was harassing the mods because I asked them a question 2 times in 3 months. There’s no discussing with them. They come down at you with a hammer and it’s just mean. But if people attack you? If people are cruel? Totally fine. I’m a huge rule follower but I’m human and make mistakes. I hope here there is discussion allowed with the powers that be in case i mess up. I try to be respectful and kind. I just want to all get along.

Don't say you weren't warned.

I've been discussing this on Mastodon too, but more focused on features and limitations related to federation rather than people being dumber in one place or the other. But I also want more open conversations, which is one of the things I believe ActivityPub helps with.
So instead of voting for Lemmy I'll go ahead and say I prefer Kbin since I've found it easier here to interact with posts from other fediverse platforms.
Just read carefully the rules of each group/magazine/community as everyone is free to tidy up their spaces as they wish, reasonably or not.

It's great - scratches the itch, overall. I sometimes pine for places where major debates on a specific topic constantly rage - ideally, I'd be able to discuss religion whenever I wanted, skipping threads I felt I didn't want to wade into....

But it is a good enough replacement overall and I feel like we are proceeding to having such a size. I am also open to the idea that I have not curated enough to find a place where this si consistently happening in the Fediverse yet...

I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks.

There have been some controversies that have led to banning and banning of entire instances. Usually, this involves Lemmy instances that were tolerating a lot of blatant transphobic memes that cut deep and were very mean...

I get why people isolated them.

I am still worried, though, that there are people who would still react this way to good faith discussion where there are disagreements. While there are some places where that is for sure OK, I think there are some instances that might react so negatively as to want to ban a specific user or their instance over it. I may be overreacting but IDK.

Honestly? No

The good news is that we have a lot less of the dumbfuckery where people think the pinnacle of their life is a chain of meme posts.

But I think the decentralized and duplicated nature of lemmy prevents any meaningful conversations. People who just want an echo chamber stay in their version of a board and rely on moderators to scorched earth anything that doesn't fit a narrative. But it also means that people who DO want a conversation might never even see each other or not want to repeat themselves. Interesting point made in the world version of a thread but you tend to hang out in the zip? Yeah...

Which... is kind of message boards. Reddit was "successful" because it was effectively a single vbulletin site that EVERYONE was on so you basically only had one or two gaming forums and so forth. Whereas this is back to the days of usenet and everyone having a phpbb. You might recognize some folk from the Beyond Unreal forums at TTLG but those are different forums with different "cultures" and so forth.

That said: I can't help but gush over Mastodon. That is increasingly my favorite social media... ever? Because lemmy very much feels like a bunch of people who can't get over their ex and keep bringing them up in ever increasingly weird ways. Whereas Mastodon feels like everyone collectively said "Fuck twitter. I always hated it. Let's actually make a good town hall site" and... we kind of did. Yeah, you still have brigading dumbasses and a lot of the decentralization issues. But you also have people who actually respond to comments and have discussions. And while you still have the inherent flaws of trying to convey a point in a microblog, you also have a lot more "Wait, what are you trying to say?" kind of comments.

And... I am not sure what "lemmy" can really do. I think we have all collectively agreed to block certain instances (whether at the instance level or accounts blocking them ourselves) which helps with the... terrorist threats. But unless "lemmy" can decide to stop talking about reddit and stop trying to reinvent reddit... it is never going to be a place worth developing a community at. Shitposting and one off questions? Sure. But it won't be somewhere that you actually go to interact with other human beings.

In your particular case: yes, lemmy is absolutely the answer.

It isnt for a lot of other folks. Lemmy has a lot less moderators/moderation and a lot more alternative communities and multiple instances.

This has a ton of implications. You can still get banned for petty reasons but usually not from the instance but just from a community. In that case you join or make another one which doesnt ban people for {particular_reason}.

It also means that you dont get the tons of posts and comments. Imo as a reddit refugee, people from reddit are going cold turkey on drinking from a firehose or more accurately, being showered in content. There is a million dollar business and many years of experience, social circles and code behind that. Lemmy is like reddit in the early days, just much later.

So if you ever feel there is a lack of content, consider hunting for it on lemmyverse.net for example. You can add non-banned instances to your instance by searching for a community‘s handle.

There will still be people here you dont agree with and the people here are a little different but all in all I‘d say its a pretty good thing. :)

Have fun.

Not really.

It's a good alternative to what I used to do with my free time, worm charming. It's not the same without a cobra.

I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned

From a subreddit or from reddit as a whole?

My perma-ban happened in a discussion within the r/EveryoneKnowsThat search for a lost wave song

If from Reddit as a whole, unless the admins have changed a LOT in the last year, that sounds weird. They usually only banned accounts over calls to violence and promoting piracy blatantly.

I once got temporary ban for saying I preferred Zelda Breath of the Wild over Tears of the Kingdom

wat. was a small personal sub? That's just a random suspension.

I like Lemmy as a substitute for a general non-specific social forum to engage with others. It's not as popular so it's more intimate here.

What's missing is the general popularity and existence of robust communities. I think this is a good thing because it drives me to find other more specific websites and forums related to my interests. Some of those communities are harder to find and have less content though.

There's a middle ground between Lemmy and Reddit that doesn't yet exist. The hope (I think) is that the infrastructure will mimic the best of Reddit while rejecting the worst of Reddit.

I was complaining about the Reddit echo chamber for probably close to ten years. The arrows have not been used as designed for a long time. They're supposed to mark an item as relevant or not relevant, not as a like or dislike. Had they been used properly... well, let's put it this way, AI is now being trained based on what people like, not based on what information is relevant or correct.

Incidentally, I was brought to Lemmy for a reason similar to you. I posted one innocuous question on one sub that got me banned from a totally unrelated sub where I wasn't even a member (evidently, engaging with one sub, regardless of your reasons or opinions, is enough for another sub to ban you, even if you fully support the other sub).

Eh it's slightly like Reddit in the sense you have to walk on eggshells. If you look at the Modlogs, in my case for example, you'll see I had comments deleted because it appeared to be disrespectful? Someone who I was responding to decided to label my response as having an, "attitude".. I'm too old to be a d*ck to people online - unless of course I'm returning the favor but even then I mostly brush it off and I don't go crying to the mods or reporting comments. Sticks and stones and all that.

But so far while the community is much smaller, it's definitely a lot more open to discourse between people with different/opposing views, or so it seems so far except you will definitely get downvoted for opposing views.

Sadly, it's a worse echo chamber. In my experience mods are far more likely to wield power like little dictators and ban for good faith dissent, as there's no governing body above them to prevent this. I've been banned for being pro-Israel by several such petty tyrants.

Upvotes and downvotes are generally per-server though. It's interesting to see how posts and submissions are regarded on other instances.