With Lemmy - I can block whomever is bothering me and I will not see their posts ever again. I can see their notifications and they somehow can keep responding to me (which ought to be worked on). But erasing their existence on my end should be a thing when you don’t want to deal with them.
Lemmy and other federated spots, allow me to make posts that I would otherwise get faulted for if I tried them on Reddit. Like on AskReddit, they don’t like it when you ask a question and try to put something in the message body for clarification or it gets removed.
So you have to spend time making another comment to clarify with the possibility of it not being understood anyways because hey, hindsight users.
The karma system on the fediverse does not necessarily impact how much you can post and where you can post. Probably one of the big differences between Lemmy and Reddit for example. If you had negative karma on Reddit, good luck trying to post anywhere because you’ll get nagged with Captcha systems.
And good luck posting anywhere you’d like on different subreddits because they’ll just outright remove your posts automatically because an arbitrary karma count wasn’t met and no subreddit is transparent about it.
No ads, and I can use a client of my choice.
decentralization
The ability to not be killed by a single individual or entity.
No stupid ads, largely no stupid people (compared to Reddit), seemingly very few conservatives, no antivaxxers that I’ve seen.
Ah the pre every-device-you-own-has-Wi-Fi Internet.
You had to work to be online, and for me, it was timed (my parents installed Cyber Patrol, but didn’t change the disable-for-an-hour password). You got on, got what you needed, like the Ghostbusters theme midi, and you got the hell off.
The plus/minus side of Lemmy is that it’s easy to reach the “end”, when you start seeing things from the last time you browse. So you get off your phone, and waste a few hours on Factorio.
I’m really believing now that this is how the internet should be. Everything hooked on the whole 24/7 fishing for content even if scraping at the bottom of the barrel, making up things for artificial engagement and baiting for reactions consumes too much of what potential it had.
It really should be treated as just a thing you go on, talk to a few people, do a few tasks, get what you want/need and then hop off to do whatever.
Living on the internet should not be a thing. I’d know, because the internet is literally a part of my life. I do not recommend.
I mean, being able to reach the end is a good thing. Limits doom scrolling.
No ads. It required a little bit of effort to get here which keeps it a little smaller and more serious. Oh, also, If someone says, “hey, I really like this chair,” and then I go learn about that chair, I don’t have to get ads about that chair for the next two years - which I guess is part of the no ads.
simply not belonging to any corpo entity
No pushed agenda because of that either. No profit motive, no paid promotions, potential for a propaganda engine later, but right now the only thing being pushed is a free open discourse.
The ability to contribute beyond posting/moderating. Anyone with a good idea and some technical know how can make a significant difference to the entire platform.
Preventing replies can done on some Fedivere apps (not Lemmy, yet, though, I guess). e.g.
As for your other points, they all sound like attempts at improving the quality of the conversation. They might not have been implemented well, but requiring a clarifying comment for a question, and blocking low-karma accounts aren’t bad ideas in themselves. Lemmy, etc don’t really deserve praise for not even trying to implement ideas like this at all.
(the benefits that others are mentioning in the comments have lots of validity, though, of course)
Misskey is microblog compared to Lemmy or Kbin , but still it’s fun to use albeit more demanding on resources. While Kbin/Lemmy see karma as numbers, Mastodon (main branch) as likes, Misskey have emoji’s so you can convey your feelings without making short replies.
Sure some people will say that’s dumb or useless, but hey when you see some art and having only ❤️ instead of 🆒 or :cool__i: or :otoge_rank_aaa: and so on.
There is many other neat features but the main point of this comment is.
You can join in on conversation without restricting yourself to limitations imposed by soft/server one use.
Add on top that you can self host which is not for everyone but people having their whole identity tied to their own space instead of Twitter/Youtube/Twitch etc.Which would be true if Misskey wouldn’t send error and deny me sending message, so we still far off in that point.I use the Catodon platform and it’s such a fun UI!
Besides your first point, all the other ones sound like issues with the Reddit communities you are posting to, not issues with Reddit itself.
Lemmy don’t design to milk value from its user.
Better drugs, mostly.
