Lemmy's protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.
Because Lemmy isn't run by a singular company, you don't get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.
The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can't find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit "shreddit" website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
As a former web dev, I know it's normal industry standard stuff, but it's really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.
Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what's reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.
In a professional capacity, it was React with TypeScript for front-end, Node for backend with Nginx to serve static assets. At the end of the day, it wasn't really for me. I enjoy web dev for hobby projects, but working with it day after day ruined my intrinsic desire to keep doing it.
Oooooh this is relevant to my interests!! After 20yrs doing web dev I crashed out of two jobs in 6 months completely hating coding. Can't even bring myself to look at code nowadays.