They both have pros and cons. Both deal with spam, AI slop, and other BS. It seems like a “pick your poison” kinda thing.

After using reddit for years and Lemmy for months I’ve made some observations, YMMV though. I interact most heavily with ask type subs on both platforms. I’ve noticed a significantly further left lean here. I figured it’d be less moderated but I haven’t really found that to be the case. I’ve also noticed in some cases very crazy people have been banned/shadow banned off redit and end up here spewing wild shit. Opinions tend to be stronger here. Very long answers are more common here. Post creation in communities like this are generally better in my experience because replies are people who care to answer meaningfully or not at all. If I ask a question here I’ll get responses from the leftist/liberal/communist/anarchist/antirealist side of things exclusively. On reddit I’ll get leftist/liberal/left/right/alt right answers.

can’t be compared. They don’t play in the same league number-wise. I got a lot less interactions here on Lemmy/piefed than I used to have on Reddit, but since I don’t want to use Reddit it doesn’t matter much: I’m here, not over there anymore ;)

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Reddit has orders of magnitude more content. There is no debate on that.

If you stay away from the popular subs on Reddit you can avoid the spam.

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Reddit has more of everything, good and bad.

The community will determine if the good outweighs the bad.

I would say a trusted community for discussion and knowledge on Reddit would be r/woodworking. That community is very helpful and stays on topic. Many hobby communities are like this so long as the mods do a good job.

Then you have all the major political and cultural communities that I consider places to stay away from.

While a lot of the discussion may be accurate the methods people use to convey them can be dogmatic.