Lemmy is relatively slow with breaking news and misses a lot of the fluff that other sites would have in between truly noteworthy things. For addiction prevention, this is pretty great— if I missed a couple days on Reddit, the entire conversation was different. Here on Lemmy, I can show up a couple days later and still see the big things from the previous days. I can respond to notifications days later without feeling bad. I never really feel out of the know unlike Reddit, and if I was incentivized to log in because of that, I’d definitely say Lemmy is less addictive.

Absolutely, but it's different. For-profit media needs to maximize, well profits. So their platforms will be designed around this. If they profit from advertisements that means they need you to be using the app as much as possible and it will be designed to manipulate you into using the app, engaging with content, making content, etc.

Without those incentives, people can browse differently. Though we are products of our environment, so if we have been trained to use social media in a certain way, we are still likely to use say Lemmy that same way.