I’m a nurse and reddit has a nursing subreddit I like to contribute to because they give good advice regarding my job, how to deal with arrogant doctors, bitchy coworkers… they know things a regular user in a generic channel couldn’t answer, because they don’t know the job.
I think asking in a channel like this for nursing advice doesn’t make much sense, because this is not a nursing specific channel.
Something similar happens to my workplace questions: there is an antiwork lemmy, but the one in reddit is much larger and they also have a work community, and so far I haven’t found anything like that on lemmy.
Another issue is size: For some problems, like violence in the hospital I need speedy advice and I get that faster when the communities are larger. Reddit is larger.
Simply replying ‘we don’t monetize’ while true and one reason why I turned to lemmy and don’t use reddit as much now, is not convincing enough for my particular case.
I’m helping with a handful of healthcare communities here and… I agree! Career communities are helpful and the health career communities on Reddit are especially so. They’re well moderated and the discussions are productive. As much planning and care we might put into the Lemmy ones, it will take time to get that kind of crowd sourced support.
More on that: !medicine@mander.xyz is being run as a parallel community for r/medicine, and we’re in communication with the mods there. We haven’t announced things in a big way yet (everyone got busy), but the goal was for this very situation
Right now my advice is to use both
You can also see fediverse medical community hub for other healthcare related spaces. I have some new ones to add, which I’ll do soon (again, got busy)