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.

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.

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.

People are chill for the most part

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.

Less endless scrolling tbh. Took me a bit to get used to and I still check Lemmy often, but there's a time when I've seen everything for the day

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Less redditors

Instances and the local discussions in them. Always feels like if the fediverse gets overwhelming, you can retreat to your local page and it feels more cosy.

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