I am yet another fledditor. I think I looked at nearly all the alternatives and I liked the Fediverse the best.

I do miss the sheer volume of participation on reddit, but I that has been steadily improving. And the quality and tone of the conversations is generally much better.

Any forums with large numbers of participants is going to have certain problems. The difference is that reddit turned most of those problems into institutions while Lemmy provides better ways to deal with them and easier ways to avoid them.

Having worked in high tech for almost four decades, I have come to appreciate the advantages of not having everything controlled by a central authority. Sooner or later the leadership, however benevolent, will change into something repressive and exploitive. Once that happens, it will remain that way forever, because there is no financial or political incentive to move in that direction. Replacement has been the only thing that works, at least so far. The Fediverse provides an alternative to that cycle that seems viable.