Third party client support. Specifically alternate web UI's focused on desktop like Alexandrite because if I'm being honest here, I think the comment nesting in Lemmy's offical web UI lacks enough distinction to be useful on desktop (its clearly optimized for mobile browsers). Following conversations can be frustrating on desktop. Without Alexandrite I'd most likely be a mobile app (Voyager) user only.
Edit: No, third party web front ends for reddit do not work anymore. Remember those pesky API changes that went into effect in July and were the entire reason the majority of us are on lemmy now? Yeah, that didn't just kill off third party mobile apps.
In all seriousness, all apps and frontends should to implement countermeasures (if they haven't already) so that you can turn off image previews as needed
Also that up and down votes are not tallied on user profiles. One of the issues with reddit is that if your point of view is unpopular, you cant discuss it on subs that require X amount of karma. Eventually you will be downvoted into being unable to reply. Here, conversation is more open and accounts dont carry a scarlet letter.
This also seems to have the effect of people getting less salty at being down voted, on reddit I noticed the trend of people verbally expressing salt at even a single down vote editing their whole comment to go "and to the brainlet sheeple soyjack who down voted me I'd like you to know yada yada"
Here I notice less people throwing a verbal tantrum over the idea not everyone likes their opinion. Whenever I get the occasional down vote barrage at a spicy opinion I think "ah well can't win em all, guess maybe my opinion might be a little shit" not amend my post with "HOW FUCKING DARE YOU YOU FUCKING SUBHUMAN TROGLODYTES"
I still remember how annoyed I was when reddit disabled that. It was a useful data point, especially in hobby communities or other places where it can be difficult for newbies to judge the quality of advice/answers they're receiving so I was thrilled to see it here on Lemmy. Going by upvotes alone is not always showing you an accurate picture of a community's reaction to a comment.
It's why I'm still furious about YouTube removing the dislike count. That single decision has probably led to lots more people getting scammed--and YouTube not getting my premium dollars I would've otherwise gave.
And the ability to turn off scores entirely! I run it that way most of the time. A post can have thousands of up/down votes but I can't tell and it keeps it from infuencing how I'll vote.
It was a feature I wanted to experiment with on reddit but couldn't
At some point I stopped using Reddit on the web/desktop and just started to use it on my phone/tablet. I tried different apps, but settled with RIF. Every few years I'd try different apps, but always found my way back to RIF.
Reddit did a bunch of stupid things over the years, but I could happily ignore them and continue to use RIF.
When RIF went away I had to find a new app. The official app wasn't going to work for me. Old Reddit on the phone wasn't going to work for me.
Luckily there are plenty of Lemmy apps. I've settled on Voyager (wefwef) but Boost seems fine too.
Sure, the content has changed a bit, but it's close enough.
For me a good app is key. Lemmy has good apps. I use Lemmy.
So many apps redesign themselves and assume I'll get used to it. In actuality they cause me to wonder, "Do I still need you?" and start looking for alternatives.
That isn't to say that apps can't ever redesign themselves, but so many redesigns seem to follow the latest trend and don't demonstrate a clear understanding of their users.
Fewer users.
Once a site hits a critical mass of users the amount of content goes up and quality goes down. Once you reach that point it begins accelerating and turns the whole community to trash.
To be fair, this can be offset by sticking to smaller communities. All the large communities on reddit were low quality, but reddit's large userbase allowed a lot of niche communities to exist with an acceptable amount of users. Lemmy (with its smaller overall user numbers) has much better "large" communities, but many of the niche communities barely have enough active users to get by.
Language, you can filter content by language you speak
Edit title, If with my broken english and autocorrect, I write down does anybody now about a boardgame for trees ? I can do a ninja edit without deleting the post
Interaction with Mastodon (and the rest of the fedi), seriously, imagine being able to answer to a tweet from reddit, with Lemmy you can answer to a toot
The community is more mature, less stupid pun chains (pretty sure those are mostly bots at this point), and less presence of interest groups (nefarious or not).
Real communism has never happened, except in Monsters Inc where the workers seized the means of production to create a better company from the worker to the workers.
Multiple communities for the same topic, but on different Lemmy instances.
This is both good and bad (which c/ do I subscribe to?) but I argue its a pro more than a con.