There are a lot of areas in which I do prefer Reddit, but there are two critical ones where the Threadiverse -- and it's not just Lemmy, got mbin and company -- win:

• Open source. I'd rather be contributing to a project. Well, in theory, someone could make closed software, but you can use an entirely open-source stack if you want.

• Third party client use is permitted. I don't want to be required to run someone's software on my computer. Too many privacy issues, kills room for improvement. This change is what sent me off Reddit.

There are some minor benefits as well:

• Currently small enough that it's not a big target for spammers and such.

• The federated structure has some substantial benefits.

  It tends to force more competition, I think, rather than just having the first person who sits on a community name owning it.

  It makes the system highly resistant to full failure -- I've seen instances go down, but not once since I've joined has the whole Threadiverse gone down. Early Reddit in particular had days where it was unavailable.

  There is no one Reddit company with total control over content -- individual instances may defederate or choose what content to permit directly on themselves, but there's no one person whose whim chooses what everyone can see. Ironically, a number of peole seem to have showed up here because they wanted heavier content moderation, but what they wanted it on was on their instance so that they didn't see stuff -- the Threadiverse as a whole is less moderated, which I prefer; I can choose an instance that doesn't defederate and make my own content calls.

• A selection of server software and Web interfaces to choose from. I disliked the new Reddit Web UI, but old.reddit.com, while usable, was simply dead, receiving no further work. I have about five Web UI options on my own home instance alone, none of which are dead.

• Dark mode out-of-box. I've always preferred light-on-dark interfaces. Dark-on-light was only popularized when Apple pointed out -- reasonably, for the time, early 1980s -- that most data people were working with reflected paper documents, which for reasons of ink use, were almost always dark-on-light, and it'd be nice to have onscreen stuff reflect the actual documents. But in a mostly-paperless world, nothing was keeping us on dark-on-light except inertia from an earlier period.

• It looks like the auto-renumbering feature for numbered lists in Markdown, which I always felt was a major misfeature, was disabled.