To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.
At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.
Most of the Lemmy post's / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.
It reminds me of that good old saying "you are not immune to propaganda", well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.
P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn't pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It's amazing.
The two biggest surprises I've had so far:
I hate to even suggest it just because of how much of a buzzword it has become. But blockchain feels like a possible answer to the identity problem. It would couple one's identity to the network as opposed to the instance.
That's not to say that instance-level identities shouldn't be allowed as well; but it would be nice to have the option. Right now one basically needs to sign up for separate accounts on as many instances as possible to prevent bad actors from posing as them. A universal ID would solve that.
I've been thinking about this for the last couple days, and I agree. There's even the problem of duplicate "subs* popping up on other instances. Federation as it currently is seems to be something that works a lot better with a Twitter alternative than a Reddit one. There's probably some tweaks that can be done to make it a more unified experience. I have some ideas, but I don't think they'd work.
These are my suggestions, and I'm sure there's a reason why they haven't been done.
I completely disagree with that it works better for mastodon than lemmy. I think it was confusing as hell on mastodon, but makes perfectly good sense on lemmy.
Communities are a major advantage, because they allow people without technical knowhow and capital, to create and moderate places of common discussion. This was an issue with mastodon because instances was the only way to divide users into topics, which prevented non tech savvy people from making these categories. Having communities, separates the concern of hosting from the concern of moderating.
Furthermore, I don't understand the problem people have with "duplicate" instances. What is the issue with subscribing to more than one? It's not like you have a limited number of subscriptions. There are already a couple threads on the issue tracker on GitHub, about implementing "multi communities" and so on, it has too many downfalls in my opinion.