Welcome!

But I have to ask, why are you guys here and not on Reddirt?

Hilarious typo if it wasn’t intentional.

Where the population us much larger and its basically the same?

First thing you quickly realize here is that larger is not necessarily better. Small is beautiful, you can have actual thoughtful conversations with individuals here without the incessant dogpiling and low effort meme replies. I have even got smacked down (and rightly so) for accidentally bringing some of that with me at one point. It’s not needed or desirable here.

It appears a few instances dominate this landscape anyway?

When you actually look at the comments I usually find almost everyone is on a different instance, in fact when there are relatively small numbers of comments like the are on most posts, you often won’t even see the same instance in the comments twice unless it’s the same person. Yeah, some instances have “huge numbers” of people and communities (lemmy.world) but I think a lot of them are honestly just rarely used, abandoned, or otherwise non-participatory, and the communities can be used by anybody (which is exactly the point of federation). The people actually spending their time here are on a wide variety of instances, often even using different frontends or software. And that’s great. To me, the ecosystem feels healthy and diverse.

Its not like this is unchecked social media, they still moderate these places right?

The point is you can choose an instance whose moderations suit you. (Almost?) all instances moderate to some degree, complete unmoderation is how you end up infested with child porn and other horrible shit. But the directions they moderate in, and the specific things they moderate, can vary wildly depending on the preferences of the owners and the countries they operate in. They also federate with and defederate different instances, which is a large-scale form of moderation. Most instances defederate (and have been defederated by) hexbear and lemmygrad. But not all of them do. Some also defederate lemmy.ml. But not most. And of course those three still federate with each other, and with some other instances. The point isn’t to completely prevent isolated echo chambers, it’s to allow the instances themselves (and the users who join them) to choose how much echo they want to hear compared to how many challenging views they disagree with. Everyone should be able to find a balance that suits them. Most of the people complaining about the content on Lemmy have probably just chosen the wrong instance, frankly, because most people don’t understand how this works and the biases and moderation attitudes inherent in all these different instances is not always super obvious at first glance.

Reddit sucks now. I still check there regularly but I find both the content and the commenting less and less interesting and find myself spending less and less time there. It hasn’t been a sudden process, but the more time I spend on Lemmy the more I like it and the more communities I find and engage in.