I enjoy not having corporate censorship deciding what I can and can’t see or say; not that I comment or post that much.

Most of all: it’s run non-for-profit. There are no ads, donations are optional (I have the means to chip in a bit each year) and its not VC funded and therefore has no intrinsic pressure to enshittify like reddit repeatedly did. Lemmy does not exploit me.

I’ve been able to make (very minor) improvements to the codebase.

I could download and host an instance if I thought there was one my hobbies needed.

I can move around pretty easily without missing much if admins are moderating in a way I disagree with, or kowtow to corporate interests or garbage national laws. And some of the reddit admins (not merely subreddit mods) were abusive.

i like piefed because it’s not owned by a publicly traded company with massive ai deals, there’s fewer terfs, and shonky > snoo

My instance doesn’t sell what I write to train AI.

Of course, the AI sumbitches probably scrape Lemmy for content too like they scrape everything for content. But at least Lemmy doesn’t give them my content on a platter, nicely packaged up and ready to exploit and monetize. They have to do the scraping.

Conversation can happen in the comments on lemmy.

It’s calmer. Less clearly corporate interest promoted content. Less rage baiters. Less bots.

Well the apps and interface is better for sure.

I still doom scroll reddit I’m somewhat ashamed to say, but I only post on Lemmy. I do rather enjoy the smaller base here to interact with.

Ethics. Reddit is corporate so they can eat poop and dye.

lemmy doesn’t let the idf to moderate their communities and you can say things that run contrary to mainstream narratives.

Reddit’s culture is extremely toxic. Like, I actually left Reddit before Lemmy existed for that reason.