In theory as far as I can see Lemmy is heading for Reddit 2.0, which is way worse.
In my eyes, currently:
- Mods are abusing their powers, as usual.
- Lemmy. World is acting more like a company by day.
- Some instances block VPN and Tor.
- Federation is kinda of not that perfect right now.
- I guarantee that not a single instance will defend their users privacy.
So… That bring me to my question, Why would anyone who can use Reddit, use Lemmy instead?
I think your premise is flawed tbh and lemmy is still beta. Every lemmy server has the potential to be its own community. I don’t actually care much about the federation, vegantheoryclub.org is its own thing with its own users we’re small but we have a matrix chat and a discord too. With the new version we’re probably going to turn off the votes. Hexbear existed longer as a stand alone site than it did with federation and has one of the most active communities. So really big picture is that lemmy is the software that can bring back the distributed forums of all and federation is just a side benefit.
Who cares about mods and mod powers, seriously. If you don’t like a community, launch your own server and pay it forward you can run it however you want and attract your own users.