Honestly, Lemmy used to be a refreshing departure from Reddit when people were joining because they hated Spez for political reasons, but now people just hate ads and are miffed about the moderator upheaval. Lemmy is basically just ad-free Reddit with worse moderation now.

Overall, it's still better than Reddit, but that's a low bar. I'm starting to think that social media, federated or not, is a bad idea. We need to bring back topical forums and ban people for being off-topic and wrong.