What do you love about Lemmy, compared to Reddit?

We are Lemmy, we were on Reddit.

We are Lemmy, resistance is futile.
- You will be elemmynated
- If I can resist Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (of which I have never had an account, don't have, and probably won't have on any of those 3), I can resist Lemmy.
Took me a second to understand, but yeah that's a great way to put it
Eh, I'd rather say we are on the fediverse. Lemmy is just the app that some of us use to access the fediverse, but there are many others.

A distinct lack of Monetization/ads

Lemmy is also not tracking the sites you visit. Everytime you click on a link on reddit, you're redirected through out.reddit.com.
Worry not, ads still appear, tho we ban them relatively quickly.
- Can you tell us more about that, please?

Feels smaller and more cozy to me.

Thats the biggest issue I DON'T like about Lemmy. I want everyone in the world on the fediverse.
- I like a large userbase myself, would prefer it to be larger than it is, but if everyone showed up tomorrow, it'd collapse. We'd see scaling problems that hadn't been anticipated, anti-spam/anti-abuse systems wouldn't have had time to adapt, etc.
  
  Takes time with problems gradually appearing and becoming more serious and solutions showing up to deal with them.
Same

You can actually participate in discussions. On the popular Reddit subs, you click a thread and there are 9000+ replies already. No matter how insightful your post, no one's gone see it.

The A.I will see it when it's trained on it
- What's keeping AI from training on Lemmy?
  
  Hint:
- All the more reason not to post it in the first place.
Also less circlejerking and "that's what she said"/"I also choose this guy's dead wife".
- This
You gotta know how to optimize visability. I'd regularly have comments that had thousands of upvotes.
- Timing is everything. I once had "most upvoted post of the day" and like 20K karma from a stupid joke that was a reply to the first top-level comment on a default sub. The only reason that happened was because it got into "rising" exactly as the US users started waking up and opening the site.
  
  I could've posted the exact same comment on any other post in that thread or even the same one but at a different time, and no one would've seen it.

I was using my phone to access Reddit through an app called RIF. It stopped working.

I can access Lemmy on my phone through an app called Boost. When I revisit a thread, it displays the new comments in a different color. Very very very convenient for active threads.

I used Boost for Reddit, and now Boost for Lemmy.

It's incredible how much the app is part of the experience. Same experience, completely different data source, it mostly just feels like early Reddit again, with niche subs of mere hundreds of people.

People are on average nicer here. Few loud nutjobs but overall I have mostly pleasant discussions.
Am the same, Boost fan. I still lurk too much, but really enjoy the conversations.

Okay, back to lurking for me, run out of things to say.

I recognise usernames, so it feels like conversations between people are happening rather than just throwing stuff out there for it to be ignored.

Other thing is there are small communities with 1-2 mods so you know them and they aren't usually "the superuser" that mods 10 different communities.

I don't say there are none of them, just that it is usually small and you recognize the mod that just steer his small community.
- When I joined reddit, it was at least a year—probably 3 years—before I was banned from a subreddit—r/AskReddit. I've been here little more than a year and I've not only been banned from a notable community here, but when I asked to be unbanned—once, then letting perhaps a few weeks pass, then twice—I got no reply.
  
  (and I'm not going to ask a 3rd time, but will simply create a [community-I-was-banned-from]2.)

honestly, I always feel so much more part of the conversation here. on Reddit, unless you time it just right and browse young posts, chances are your comment will never be seen. on here you'll be one of 50 top level comments at most. and that's only the biggest threads. it would be nice to see more activity on more threads, but often when i comment on something with no comments it's enough to start the conversation.

almost none of my comments here get ignored, and the conversations that come out of them feel better. unless it's about Linux. you people are insane and unapproachable when it comes to operating systems. not because you're wrong, you're just... a lot.

Lemmy allows 3rd party apps and is not run by a company that would disallow them

Commenting on a post doesn't feel like yelling into a void, comments are more than a number here. Also people are always trying to be helpful, which is so nice compared to reddit.

mods can suck, admins can suck, but you can go off and start your own instance, with blackjack and hookers.

I also like that I can see that someone is posting from hexbear, and I can disregard their comment. It saves time.

Yeah the instancing makes malicious users much harder to come by, and easy to hide for sure.
Same reason I joined here, plus most users on Reddit are just bots at least in here you can tell who's a bot and who's real and you can tell which comments to agree or disagree with and which to ignore based on the instance lol, it's way easier and friendlier here tbh I was banned for violent comments on Reddit mainly because the hive mind there are mostly removed but in here I can say Fuck Reddit, it was good once before the coronavirus now it's just a piece of shit.
- It would not surprise me to find out 50%+ of Reddit activity is bots at this point
- I was banned for violent comments on Reddit
  
  punches Chaos
  
  Yeah! Violence rules!

I love the whole premise, brought by the ActivityPub protocol, that no individual or group has full control of the whole.

It isn't like nobody wants to become Lemmy's Spez. Plenty people do; they simply can't.

By the users, for the users. Almost all they instance admins are just like everyone else. We just know some it infrastructure.

I know it's arguably part of why it's intimidating to your average newcomer but I adore that it's mostly nerdy techies lol. I'm so used to dropping something vaguely technical and being met with the online equivalent of blank stares so people being willing and able to engage with that sort of thing is super nice!

I don't think it is only techy nerds, I am a granny and much prefer Lemmy. I no longer feel nervous when posting here at all as people are polite and are actually interested in discussion rather than simply arguing. And the premise that there can never be only one person in control is refreshing.
- Oh I don't think it's all techies, but they definitely make up a good chunk of the userbase. Hard agree on it feeling more chill too, I'd been kinda afraid to comment anything on reddit before I left.
- Also old and non-tech. Prefer it here.
Early Reddit -- I was on when it was one page and a large amount of the content was directly posted by spez and company, was mostly talking about stuff that they cared about, like Lisp and Linux and startups -- was somewhat similar. More of a university focus and didn't have the economically-far-left, furry, or LGBT crowds prominent, so not the same, but some decided similarities.
- Good point, I didn't get into reddit that early but it definitely rings familiar
Ive read so many amazing detailed tech posts. It feels like a treat to read some of the threads started here. I think my favorite post was a blog going into detail on what swap was. I and many others had been completely wrong about swap and it was a joy to read how it worked and why it was a default on so many linux systems.

Not owned by corpos

It has a smaller community, which makes it easier to recognize people.

The percentage of linux users is also great.

The percentage of linux users is also great.

Yes! I don't feel like a weirdo here for using Linux exclusively on my computers. It's nice to interact with a community that shares the values which lead each of us to use Linux. But even within that, the users here are not only respectful, but celebrate novice users that use distros like Mint. In my experience, some Linux users can be rude by presenting a sense of superiority for using distros that take lots of technical expertise. Not only does that not seem to be the case on Lemmy, but it's actually made fun of (I use Arch, btw 😉).

One thing I love here is how I can disagree with someone and still have a civil discussion. It feels weirldy amazing to reach a consensus instead of just getting stuck in a cycle of unrelated personal insults. Sure, shitheads like that do still exist here, but I don't remember ever having a civil disagreement/argument on Reddit.

I also feel that I've embraced the practice of blocking & moving on a lot more after I moved here, and tried my best to be more constructive.

In general, people are more willing to call out misinformation and present nuanced takes. I much prefer that. Reddit has recently become a cesspit of ragebait and misinformation.

It's not constantly being tweaked and reworked to look and perform worse for the sake of profit.
Fewer fascists
Fewer people who are completely illiterate and can't follow a conversation that's already laid out in an easy to read format.
Community rules are not so bloated that only the mods and their friends can make top level posts in the biggest communities.
3rd party clients

Nicer, more intelligent community.

Also I can comment on a thread even an entire day late and it'll still get seen and upvoted.

i dont really care about intelligence,as that is a very vague thing to care about, even definition may vary, but the second point is important to me

Lack of spez

Less fake accounts, less political censorship, less trolls, and less bad faith argument clowns.

Of course this opinion is only accurate to the reality if you're spiritually from .ml or hexbear.

Folks can't seem to deal with outside perspectives very well and consequently love to swing that banhammer.
They're here though, more by the day.
- I'm doing my part!
- My suspicion is that there are a few instances either controlled by bad actors or indifferent to them. Blocking those can make lemmy a much better place if you aren't interested in conflict on this platform.
  
  And if you enjoy arguing or just want to hone your debate skills against trolls, you can do that, of course.

I'm either much nicer here, or people are far less confrontational. I've said it a hundred times, but every time I receive a notification on Lemmy I brace myself for another senseless asshole. But it's almost always positive on here.

This so much. I feel like the founding values of Lemmy lead to creating a community in which users want this to be a respectful place. There's nearly no tolerance for hate. It's awesome.
- It truly is night and day. I still see a bit of clashing in the bowels of political posts. Usually a MAGA being downvoted to -48, or various subspecies of liberals having it out, but next to that it's certainly a lot more tame and respectful.
r/ seems so angry and attacky. I see it some here too, especially recently, but still much less than over there.
- Reddit was bad for my mental health. Especially from 2016 onward. If it wasn't toxic or aggressive people, it was an endless onslaught of all the shitty things happening in the world politically. I don't even live in the States anymore, and I was still angry every single day. I still see some of it on Lemmy and it's good to be informed, but Reddit's algorithm was tailored specifically for my anger. The platform is all ego.
Senseless asshole here. FUCK YOU!

nah jk
- Frig off, Berb!
- https://www.reddit.com/r/fightsub/

Feels like I'm talking to normal people again,

I went on a bit of a rant during a recent low point personally, but still hold the opinion.

Reddit is full of people who want to be right and don't understand when a discussion is over. Constant misreading of comments to fit their narrative or enable them to try to correct, even if it doesn't make any sense, but they have to have the last word.

People actually make comments rather than the same 10 jokes reused over and over.

I don't feel like I can hold a decent conversation where my mind can be broadened or changed like here or traditional forums, it's just an opportunity to hyperfocus on one thing for upvotes.

You do find this sort of person in Lemmy too, but it's easy enough to block them out.
I once got a reply on reddit to a comment I had made ten years earlier. I looked at the person's comment history, and every single comment that I botheted to look at was a reply to things that were at least five years old. Reddit is not only full of weirdos, it's full or weirdos who will put in tremendous effort to be weirdos. I'm glad I purged my history on there.

I post something and actually get quality engagement. Just did an asklemmy post a few days ago and got tons of good advice thanks to everybody here!

Along with everyone else's great points, I'm so glad I don't have to suffer through another "thanks for the gold, kind stranger!" Or yet another painful comment chain of "puns" that are more like weak rhyming/word association, often reusing the same tired phrases. That entire place is so boring and uncreative.

Long live Lemmy!

I disagree, gently, i like chains, they are fun, and sometimes creative, even the ones i know (like rick roll), maybe this gives a kick to my slightly troll-y side, sense it is harmless and fun (at least for me, fun is subjective). I even liked the thanks for gold, it is not like the gold means anything, it just makes the community feel more live
- That's perfectly valid. With the gold thing, I was referring to the fact that people say it verbatim as I typed, (seemingly) every time. IMO it feels less genuine when someone doesn't thank another using their own words.
  
  By the way, your respectful disagreement is another reason why I like Lemmy. Courtesy seems to be more common over here :D

i still scroll through both but i engage with way more posts on Lemmy now almost everyday

so i actually find the content on Lemmy more interesting which is slightly unexpected. i thought it would end up the same

the reason you interact more here could be because people here are more nice and welcoming because it's definitely the reason I love to interact here :D

No algorithm.

Came here to say this.

It’s jarring when I stumble into conventional social media and have Joe Rogan and Hawk Tuah Girl on every other video. Money shouldn’t decide which content appears most often.
I'd actually like to have an effective recommendations algorithm. Originally, Reddit was intended to use voting as a way to predict what you wanted to see and show a personalized recommendations set. That...basically didn't work. What happened instead was that subreddits were introduced, and I used those to filter instead, just subscribed to some and only look at content from those. I do the same thing here.

I do think that there's a problem where recommendations algorithms either need to store a lot of data about you -- which I don't want to hand to one entity along with everyone else doing so, too much potential for data-mining -- or need to recommend to the preferences of some "aggregate user" that reflects what the typical user wants, which usually isn't what I want. Google News did the latter. I really liked their recommendations early-on. But over time, what they recommended shifted, got a lot more sensationalist and lowbrow. I suspect that this reflected their changing userbase. Maybe they could do better recommendations if I created an account and let them profile me, but I'm not willing to do that. Google has too much data, in my view, on everyone already.

In theory, my home instance of lemmy.today -- a small Lemmy instance -- could profile me, but because the Threadiverse is decentralized, it's harder for any one party to get a large dataset to do that for everyone. Any instance operator can see what I comment on (as with Reddit) and vote on (unike Reddit), but not what I view. They can't directly link that to my IP address either, which helps in profile-building, though as I've pointed out in the past, as things stand, the Threadiverse doesn't do a great job of isolating one's IP address, and a dedicated person could probably do a reasonable job of harvesting IP addresses.

The intelligence level on reddit has hit rock bottom. That's not to say lemmy instances are the opposite. It's just that reddit has reached what must be some kind of end stage. Someone else posted already about being met with blank stares about technical topics. It applies to pretty much any topic.

Not being very informed about a certain topic is not a problem in itself. Reddit seems to have internalized some sort of personality. One where the social milieu is about petty squabbles. They don't care about the topic itself but coming away from the replies feeling like they're the bigger dog who barked louder. More often than not I find myself just letting them have their victory. There's no real discussion happening anyways.

In the first half of reddits existence it was ridiculed for being the site full of neckbeards who think too highly of themselves on account of nerds being smart-aleck nerds. What I've seen the past several years goes to show that it isn't a nerd thing. As reddit has become more a sample of any given part of the population, this trait of reddit has not changed. People go to reddit thinking they're engaged in some kind of high intellectual discourse simply because reddit is supposed to be that.

I can't tell if these things are a trait of reddit which bled over from the other social media like Facebook and Twitter. I never used those. Just about any other platform is better compared to reddit. Whether that be lemmy instances or small forums. Could be some kind of social media mind rot or something. I don't know but that's what I attribute it to.

Absolutely. You used to be able to reliably go to the reddit comments section for more information/context, clarifications/corrections/alternative takes, sources/citations, etc. on pretty much any post. "The real TIL/joke/story is in the comments" and all that.

Nowadays the reddit comments section is all jokes (not even good ones), reaction gifs (not even relevant ones), and non sequiturs. I'm unclear what percentage is bots and what is oblivious people with nothing useful to add but a compulsion to contribute anyway.

I keep visiting the reddit comments section anyway out of habit, and nearly every time I walk away feeling disappointed and a little dirty. Fortunately Lemmy's comments are more like the old days when you at least felt like you were conversing with a human (and a literate one at that). Unfortunately outside of a few niche topics, Lemmy is severely lacking in subject matter experts, so there isn't anywhere near the same level of additional context and fact-checking on most posts that used to exist on reddit. I don't know if this is a demographics problem or a "we're under the critical mass threshold" problem; I assume it's both.
Yeah this is pretty much spot on. People go to reddit to win, not to talk.

Shitters often self segregate. The Donald or FatPeopleHate would get run out of existing instances, start their own, then go to defed hell. Contrast with reddit where they were allowed to fester in the name of "valuable conversation"

I like that it's slower moving and the moderation is open. I like that the different instances have different culture.

I like that the content and discussion generated is open and will remain open forever. I don't have to worry about the content being locked away behind a paywall or bad company direction.

I love that the platform is open to alternative technology and values open source and copy left philosophies.

Less assholes for the most part.

No bots too

Things just don’t get buried the way they do on Reddit. On Reddit I often didn’t comment on something if it was slightly older because nobody would see my comment anyway. Here it’s a completely different story. Sometimes I still get replies after like a week.

The fact that it's not run by reddit and it has working 3rd party apps. And that's pretty much it TBH.

The mods are actual humans, not bots with no life who scroll reddit all day. It's free, doesn't track my data and can be used without an app on mobile...

I'm sure someone is scraping the data...

I pretty much gave up on Reddit when I saw someone get 200 upvotes for making an Among Us joke in response to a school shooting.

Haven't seen that kind of callousness on Lemmy, which is nice.

We got instances, modlogs, third party apps, more community, open source, transparency, self hosting, decentralization, less corporate influence.

Reddit is just karma-based ego battles with no room for actual discourse. Lemmy is small and highly community-oriented so no one cares about that stuff.

I like decentralized approach and modlog feature. Really nice to be able to monitor moderation and see reasons for certain actions. This helps a lot to understand what to expect from certain instances, make the best choices for yourself and avoid frustration in future.

Subreddits could often be narrowly focused to a severe degree.

r/whatisthisthing would routinely remove comment chains that were tangent to the topic of identifying the thing posted. Say someone posted a picture of a Betamax tape and said "What is this thing?" Someone identifies it as a Betamax tape, links to the WIkipedia page, mentions that it was Sony's competitor to VHS, etc. Que a tangent where someone says "VHS won the format war and became basically the only standard available, so for a long time we didn't call the format by its name; commercials for movies would say "now available to own on video" and we called the machine a "VCR." And someone else says 'There was actually an early and unsuccessful format called VCR, it didn't do well and is pretty rare though." And all these comments get removed and the commenters get 7 day bans.

I've yet to see that brand of "the kind of anal retentive you only get from welding someone's ass crack shut from spine to scrotal seam" here.

Yeah, that really bugs me when Iook at r/askreddit. The mods only seem to allow seem to allow generic personal questions or questions about sex.

Edit: it looks like three moderation is better now! Although it's still mostly about sex.
- Yeah the old "what's the sexiest sex you've ever sexed" channel.

I was in reddit for over a decade, ended up joining when many of the links I saw on Boing Boing were from reddit posts, so I figured I'd just cut out the middleman.

Lemmy feels like reddit back in the early days, just before the rise of the novelty accounts (I kinda miss those, actually...) when people were still recognized by their usernames, even outside the niche communities.

There are a lot of areas in which I do prefer Reddit, but there are two critical ones where the Threadiverse -- and it's not just Lemmy, got mbin and company -- win:

Open source. I'd rather be contributing to a project. Well, in theory, someone could make closed software, but you can use an entirely open-source stack if you want.
Third party client use is permitted. I don't want to be required to run someone's software on my computer. Too many privacy issues, kills room for improvement. This change is what sent me off Reddit.

There are some minor benefits as well:

Currently small enough that it's not a big target for spammers and such.
The federated structure has some substantial benefits.

It tends to force more competition, I think, rather than just having the first person who sits on a community name owning it.

It makes the system highly resistant to full failure -- I've seen instances go down, but not once since I've joined has the whole Threadiverse gone down. Early Reddit in particular had days where it was unavailable.

There is no one Reddit company with total control over content -- individual instances may defederate or choose what content to permit directly on themselves, but there's no one person whose whim chooses what everyone can see. Ironically, a number of peole seem to have showed up here because they wanted heavier content moderation, but what they wanted it on was on their instance so that they didn't see stuff -- the Threadiverse as a whole is less moderated, which I prefer; I can choose an instance that doesn't defederate and make my own content calls.
A selection of server software and Web interfaces to choose from. I disliked the new Reddit Web UI, but old.reddit.com, while usable, was simply dead, receiving no further work. I have about five Web UI options on my own home instance alone, none of which are dead.
Dark mode out-of-box. I've always preferred light-on-dark interfaces. Dark-on-light was only popularized when Apple pointed out -- reasonably, for the time, early 1980s -- that most data people were working with reflected paper documents, which for reasons of ink use, were almost always dark-on-light, and it'd be nice to have onscreen stuff reflect the actual documents. But in a mostly-paperless world, nothing was keeping us on dark-on-light except inertia from an earlier period.
It looks like the auto-renumbering feature for numbered lists in Markdown, which I always felt was a major misfeature, was disabled.

Less privacy invasion, less corporate, less fash, less incoherent fury, less trolling, less need to doomscroll.

The default comment sorting shows newer and lower voted posts on Lemmy. On Reddit, if you're not early in a post, then don't bother, no one will read it.

People are chill for the most part

Extremely chill. Agressively chill.
- Can you please fucking chill?

Being able to block politics and there isn't as much content here so can't really doom scroll without tracking time

Fewer bots. That and fewer users are literally the only (social) differences, sorry if you're all trying to cope that lemmy is somehow superior in every way

It's superior in a major way however. The ability to essentially pick the set of admins you're happy with is a game-changer (and yes, you can always selfhost).
I dunno man. How can you be sure the comments you're seeing on reddit are from bots? There are some bots, but there are also a lot of ignorant mfers on that site.

I would also say that Lemmy is much better moderated, partially because it's still small enough that the mods and admins can stay on top of everything. Reddit is so chaotic that absolutely horrific comments and threads tend to slip through the cracks quite regularly nowadays.

When I post something totally innocuous on Lemmy that I'd think nobody would ever take exception to, I generally only get 2 or fewer "AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY" type replies that I can see so long as I stay away from the crazy Lemmy instances and communities and block enough of the insane users who still manage to break through.

On Reddit, there's much more "AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY"s and no upper limit known thus far, sometimes with dozens of people repeating more or less the same "AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY" but perhaps worded slightly differently.

Fewer of the obsessive stickler mods that delete posts and bans users and kills the community by reposting content to gain internet points.

The UI.

Lemmy is have way less meaningless hate than reddit.
In Lemmy you do actually have control (like changing instances if you want)
Lemmy seems a more safe place for LGBT+ people

Lemmy seems a more safe place for LGBT+ people

In my opinion, Lemmy is a trans party 🥳🎉 There are so many memes about being trans almost daily. I can't tell if there is a large portion of Lemmy users that are trans, we just like celebrating the idea, or I happened to subscribe to trans-heavy communities like !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone. Either way, even though I'm cis-af, I love it. You go, girl/boy!

Less redditors

I'm still a redittor,

and on reddit, I sometimes link to Lemmy.
- How does that usually pan out?

It's easier to block while communities here. IIRC, you have to have RES to do that on web.

I find there to be a more honest discussion here. Also, I really like that it's not run by some giant VC fueled company that is driven to make as much money as possible. It's more like a public utility where the cost is distributed among multiple instance owners. However, I am concerned about their rise in costs over time and I hope there is a plan for revenue. I'd be willing to pay.

While I'm here, I hope you all still use reddit a bit and mention Lemmy on there occasionally. I think the community can still grow.

The power mods aren't as entrenched. The federated doesn't encourage power modding as much (still there, just not as much).

When you post a comment it shows up whether it is a new or old account instead of having to meet some karma requirement. Also third party apps are very nice over being pushed to use some bloated ad filled official app.

Posts not being taken down without an explanation. The pics place has more people taking pictures themselves.

You can block entire instances. I blocked hexbear and lemmy.ml, and my feed became MUCH more pleasant to read. The vast majority of trolls seem to be on those instances.

So what I love about Lemmy now is that comment threads rarely turn toxic like they do on Reddit.

Lemmy’s feed is 1000% better. No constant reposts, no ads, and ability to filter out read posts so it’s actually unique every day. I like it way better for news than reddit.

Reddit is better for browsing individual communities.

It isn't reddit.

why reddit is better:

reddit has polls (even if it's only up to 6 choices, and <8 days)
reddit currently has more users, and thus more people to interact with
I kinda like karma pints.
my pro-Green Party/Jill Stein posts aren't visible to most redittors, and thus aren't as much downvoted, if at all
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo

why Lemmy is better:

no ads, not run by a corporation
It's federated.
as one respondent already said ITT: more cozy
my Vimeo, niconico, Archive, Wikicommons, and the very rare PeerTube posts look no worse than my YouTube posts—though with most posts, one can't see as many thumbnails.

why Miraheze is better:

no ads, not run by a corporation
I can embed YouTube videos, but not only YT but also Vimeo, Archive, niconico, Wikicommons, and Miraheze Commons (on a few of the wikis at least)
Files in Wikicommons can be transcluded.
I like the wiki format (at least their and WMF wiki formats) best.

why WMF projects are better:

no ads, not run by a corporation
Wikipedia is one of the most visited website on the internet; I enjoy categorizing files on Wikicommons; I like the structures of Wikiversity's wikidebates.

I'm also thinking of posting in RationalWiki next year.

No one asking questions you can simply put into a search enging and get the correct answer

Well... some people still are. Just not nearly as many on Lemmy compared to Reddit

because there’s less conspiracy here compared to Reddit

I find it super chill and for all the talk I see of people being toxic I never see it.

Being able to live without the stigma I created on Reddit by posting about anime and other topics.

Obviously, I posted about anime and people didn’t like it except for one user who was nice enough to sympathize with me before I left.

People on Reddit generally treat me like SpongeBob SquarePants for all I care.

People still treat me the same way on Lemmy sometimes, but I’m more able to deal with it by blocking users who threaten my livelihood.

Still new, but:

No (or less) hissyfit powermods
Less strict, hopefully no stupid bans
More privacy respecting
More tightly knit
Better front page, Reddit is just stale as of now

You can cut down on the content you don't like/democrat-posting/unwholesome content by blocking a few key users, really improves your mental health

No censorship

Technically you can create your own instance and post whatever you like, but if all the major instances defederate from you, it's still a form of censorship.
- But people can also choose their instance, and there are enough instances out there that it's hard to force all of them to defederate.
  
  I use lemmy.today as my home instance. They explicitly state in their instance policies that they want to avoid defederating with instances if possible, and so far, have no defederations. As long as there are instances like that out there, you cannot really muzzle someone.
  
  Avoiding censorship doesn't mean that people are required to consume content, just that they have the option to do so.
  
  There are two major risks that I think do apply (though the Threadiverse is no more vulnerable to either than Reddit):
  
  State censorship. Countries willing to, at the network level, ban instances or instances that federate with instances (and possibly also VPNs, though even without that, the bar to see a post is increased) can make it hard to see content. This happens, at least in part, today. One of the first discussions I was in was one where Ada, the instance admin on lemmy.blahaj.zone (transexual-oriented instance), was talking to some guy in a majority-Islamic, Middle Eastern country whose government had blocked access to lemmy.blahaj.zone at the network level. He could see posts by using a federated instance that they hadn't blocked, but not images, since those were served directly from lemmy.blahaj.zone.
  
  Right now, the Threadiverse is still small enough that it'll fly under the radar of some governments. But as it grows and becomes more prominent, media becomes of more political interest to governments.
  
  The potential for a Thresdiverse Cabal. It is possible for enough instance admins, banding together, to potentially form a cabal and to have significant influence over the system. In the past, this sort of thing has arisen on federated systems:
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
  
  There Is No Cabal (abbreviated TINC[1]) is a catchphrase and running joke found on Usenet.[2] The journalist Wendy M. Grossman writes that its appearance on the alt.usenet.cabal FAQ reflects conspiracy accusations as old as the Internet itself.[3] The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes that the joke reveals "discomfort over the potential for corruption by meritocratic leaders".[2]
  
  The phrase There Is No Cabal was developed to deny the existence of the backbone cabal, which members of the cabal denied. The cabal consisted of operators of major news server newsgroups, allowing them to wield greater control over Usenet.[4]
  
  That being said, even the Usenet backbone cabal had limited control, and the Fediverse's protocols are probably more-resistant. Usenet's NNTP relied upon traffic flooding through the network over a set of fixed links. Esch NNTP server has at least one other NNTP server that they are connected to. That upstream server could block content or filter posts, and downstream wouldn't see it. ActivityPub has every instance (potentially) talk to every other instance. I'm not sure that that won't lead to scalability issues in the long term, but it also makes it hard for operators of major instances to control what other instances see.
I've been banned from one community here already.
- What did you do?
That's subjective, mods are censors. You can host your own though.
This isn’t true at all.