With Lemmy - I can block whomever is bothering me and I will not see their posts ever again. I can see their notifications and they somehow can keep responding to me (which ought to be worked on). But erasing their existence on my end should be a thing when you don’t want to deal with them.
Lemmy and other federated spots, allow me to make posts that I would otherwise get faulted for if I tried them on Reddit. Like on AskReddit, they don’t like it when you ask a question and try to put something in the message body for clarification or it gets removed.
So you have to spend time making another comment to clarify with the possibility of it not being understood anyways because hey, hindsight users.
The karma system on the fediverse does not necessarily impact how much you can post and where you can post. Probably one of the big differences between Lemmy and Reddit for example. If you had negative karma on Reddit, good luck trying to post anywhere because you’ll get nagged with Captcha systems.
And good luck posting anywhere you’d like on different subreddits because they’ll just outright remove your posts automatically because an arbitrary karma count wasn’t met and no subreddit is transparent about it.
No stupid ads, largely no stupid people (compared to Reddit), seemingly very few conservatives, no antivaxxers that I’ve seen.
Ah the pre every-device-you-own-has-Wi-Fi Internet.
You had to work to be online, and for me, it was timed (my parents installed Cyber Patrol, but didn’t change the disable-for-an-hour password). You got on, got what you needed, like the Ghostbusters theme midi, and you got the hell off.
The plus/minus side of Lemmy is that it’s easy to reach the “end”, when you start seeing things from the last time you browse. So you get off your phone, and waste a few hours on Factorio.
I mean, being able to reach the end is a good thing. Limits doom scrolling.
I’m really believing now that this is how the internet should be. Everything hooked on the whole 24/7 fishing for content even if scraping at the bottom of the barrel, making up things for artificial engagement and baiting for reactions consumes too much of what potential it had.
It really should be treated as just a thing you go on, talk to a few people, do a few tasks, get what you want/need and then hop off to do whatever.
Living on the internet should not be a thing. I’d know, because the internet is literally a part of my life. I do not recommend.