Lemmy doesn’t track its users. Lemmy doesn’t data-mine its users. Lemmy doesn’t cram advertising down its users’ necks.

Reddit does all this bullshit.

No one owns it.

In my experience, the major flaw of every social media site. Some asshat owns it and wants to profit from it.

The ability to federate. I have virtually no fear of being addicted to a platform whose owners are malicious

The control provided to users by Fedi is the main reason for me to be on Lemmy. I run my own instance and nobody can tell me I can’t use a particular app, or I can’t tailor my experience a certain way. Reddit seems to be going to shut off their API access and force everyone to use either their terrible app or their terrible “new” UI. This won’t happen here.

Hopefully Lemmy will keep growing content-wise and communities will spring up to replace what’s currently good about Reddit. Beehaw is already good place to hang out.

one obvious benefit that is true of smaller platforms generally is “more personal connections”. it is difficult to meaningfully engage with people on reddit as people and not just usernames; past a certain point it all necessarily must blend together and communities stop being meaningful. that in kind enables a lot of the worse behavior you see on reddit, i think–it’s pretty trivial to just think of anyone that mildly inconveniences you or disagrees with you as a subhuman idiot at that point (and to talk with them accordingly), whereas here that’s harder to fall into because you’ll pretty quickly get to know who’s who.

Setting your language. This means instead of having one all encompassing “French” community I can post in the “regular” ones but set the locale as French. It’s amazing and it also makes Lemmy much less US-centric than Reddit.