Browsing for new content and communities is so much better here. Like, incredibly so. I don't know if it's just the lack of repost and karma bots or what but the quality of content is so much higher.
Lack of advertisements. Last time I used the official Reddit app it showed an advertisement every 5 posts or so. And of course no way to disable it. Good riddance.
This is definitely the most excited I've felt basically in the entire time I've used the internet. Probably the thing that comes the closest is back when I worked as a shoutcaster and had random people sending me clips and screenshots from streams on discord and twitter. But that was also a really different experience.
We're not there yet, but: stability. Once the development is reaching a stable release, even a few big servers shutting down will have no cascading effects on the rest of the network. It will just be some communities that are gone and that's it. This also means no outside manipulation, no single attack vector for the network. The truth is, the best things about it will be the things that we won't see anymore.
I'm finding the signal to noise ratio is higher here. Much higher quality content at the moment. I even see some bots that post the entire article rather than just linking it. I hope that catches on.
For me it's definitely the fact that it's not own by a single person. We've seen what kind of damage some narcissistic twats can do to our beloved platforms.
Projects like Mastodon and Lemmy are reliable for everyone, from developers to users.
It's open source, so it is possible to add features if you can think of a service that could be useful to everyone. Being a developer myself I'm excited about those opportunities.
It's moderated by the instance owner, so in a sense it is also the best free speech experience since you could always find far-right to far-left leaning instances.
There sure are some improvements to make, features to add etc. but it's already awesome.
Finally, did you ever try to open Reddit on a Raspberry Pi? Lemmy's code is so light, it could probably run on a last millenium's potato.