And considering that the main purpose of Lemmy and Mastodon in practice appears to be for their creators and their acolytes to police their communities' political compliance, I'd say that is probably the lesser evil.

Not even a huge fan of Mastodon really, but lemmy is decent.

Lemmy, being a part of the fediverse, has a bunch of servers where we can access Lemmy communities. Here's a starting point.

https://lemmy.world/

There's also the possibility of self-hosting Lemmy nodes.

It's community@instance, and the "@instance" suffix is only required if you're accessing a community hosted on a separate instance.

It sounds like you're just complaining about stuff not being familiar or an exact clone of Reddit.

Mostly because it has few users, and those users tend to write for the benefit of others rather than the benefit of themselves.

Since there is no visible karma/upvote score there's less motivation to post low-effort highly agreeable content. It's also nice being so small that I notice the same usernames over and over on the same topic and get to know people. Most comments are made in good faith I think.

Sounds like tildes is still kicking, then? I’m curious if it’s grown or shrunk in that time. There was quite a few highly active users that were posting good content, but I recall thinking the site was a bit short of “critical mass” for many of the communities.

Maybe I’ll go back and check it out. Thanks for the reminder that tildes is still around!