To me it feels like a matured Reddit. (At least most of the time 🙃)
I find it more neckbeard than Reddit, and I mean that in the most offensive way. Reddit was big enough that there were lots of places they either didn’t participate or were so rare as to not be annoying. They’re everywhere here on the big, fully federated servers.
By the same token, the semi-federated, more restrictive instances (yes, I mean beehaw) are actually quite nice places and really does feel like a mature place to casually discuss things.
In general, though, lemmy is a desert or ghost town of vibrant niche, non-IT focused communities with regular participation.
How are we defining “neckbeard” here? Actual assholes, bigots, angry hateful people? Or we just using that as a catch all for tech enthusiasts? I see a lot of conflating between the two.
The tech crowd is always there first. They’re the early adopters, so yeah, place is gonna have a lot of those. That was true on Reddit in its early days too. That goes hand in hand with a move to a decentralized platform like this. I’m continually puzzled by people that seem to think this is unusual. We came here to escape a centralized, increasingly walled and corporate controlled space…so yeah, lots of tech enthusiasts, FOSS-heads, and Linux users will be here. Where else would they be?