Oh, I forgot one thing on the downsides. The onboarding captcha-like thingy on the lemmy.ml instance is quite elaborate where you have to quote some text from a Communism book. Instances like Memes are rich with upvotes and glorification of Stalin and of the Soviet Union. While I do agree on many of the downsides of for-profit culture (as you can see in my comment above for example), here it's just extreme levels in my opinion. I personally feel somewhat uncomfortable with the strong political push in general-purpose channels, especially since lemmy.ml is supposed to be about free software.

That's the other downside. I still use Lemmy as you see, but I felt it's fair to share a negative point even if the overall conclusion is positive.