When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.
I generally don’t post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that’s not always well received. Usually I don’t get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it’s just really discouraging when I’m just trying to share my thoughts.
But having no downvotes here is so nice because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they’ll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.
It’s such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it’s more comfortable to engage here.
There are a ton of comments there, but I guess it depends where you’re looking. To me, it seems like it’s defaulting to “threads” - which are roughly equivalent to posts, as near as I can tell (they have subjects and a body). Whereas Microblog seems to be like posting to Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon. Where I see little activity are on Magazines (their version of communities or subreddits). E.g. kbin.social/m/ELI5 has 4 threads. The default home page shows many, many threads, and some have comparable comment replies to lemmy here.