It feels like 20 years ago migrating from large chatrooms to bulletin board forums with a smaller more specialized community like setup. Posts and threads don't instantly get buried, and there don't seem to be as many assholes looking to pick a fight.

I see that by scaling down, some of the the more niche forums don't get the traffic, but that will likely change over time. I'm digging the integration with Mastodon so links to people and articles don't have to flow through Twitter. It minimizes having to sift through tons of ads to read what I want.

I also like the region based instances like lemmy.ca and midwest.social having communities and news that is of interest to those regions. It would be cool once more countries have their instances / communities.

Reddit had a good idea with having subs, but many of them got too big to be able to have meaningful discussion for many people. What is the point of trying to comment and engage in a topic that has 5000 posts? Lemmy hopefully can solve that by having the same community in different instances to keep the size where more people can discuss topics in a smaller more engaging setting.