There is pretty much one thing that these places have that Reddit doesn't and that is a lack of CCP-esque account tracking and banning. Every other problem Reddit has is still here. Asshole mods that have zero accountability, toxic communities with fringe hiveminds, they are all still here.

The one thing that will always be missing because of the independent and 'federated' nature of these websites is the actual people. These website are fucking ghost towns. Looking through the top communities on here, there are only a handful that even get multiple posts a day. If you make a post on here, unless it's one of the top few communities, you're lucky to get a single comment within a day, if you even get one at all. You may get a bit of upvotes, but no one engages. On Reddit, I can make a post on AITAH or CMV or something and get hundreds of comments within an hour.

Another affect this has is basically eradicate any ability to have smaller, more niche communities. Reddit is famous for having the most specific communities of all time. One time I went on r/vizio to fix my Vizio TV, and they had solutions for me within minutes. There is no other platform where you can do that, and Lemmy sure as hell doesn't have the user numbers to allow for it. I mean you basically can't even find populated subs on here for even specific game franchises, the closest you can get to it is just c/games.

So yes, while Lemmy doesn't have the world's most oppressive ban system like Reddit, there is just no real content or engagement on here to justify not just trying to ban evade on Reddit.

This is just my personal experience though, I'd love to hear what you guys have to think

So from what I can tell, Reddit picks up on stuff like IP, but they also look at screen size and your browser too.

It's easy enough to botch the latter two, but it's tough getting a new IP. The issue is that when I use any free VPNs, they presumably have a crap ton of traffic going through them already, and I think Reddit has probably blacklisted most of them.

Has anyone on here had success with a paid, higher quality VPN? I'm not power user or anything, so honestly if just getting like a free trial for Nord or Surfshark or something would allow me to make a couple posts every now and then, that would be spectacular.