The difference is the way it is run. You got it. And if one day Midwest.social starts doing things you hate and treating it’s users like crap, then come on over to lemmy.world or lemmy.ca, or one if the other thousands instances.

People hosting the database are not the owners of the platform unlike Reddit. They get to tell us how we can use it just because they host the database.

You bring up some good points and I do believe that the model that Lemmy use can insulate it from a lot of those issues.

People posting whatever they want wherever they want and having very little understanding of nuance in language I dont think this would be a huge problem, mods can remove unwanted content and instances can decide what type of users they want to accept. As for misusing downvotes I think that issue never has ever mattered and the difference between reddit and lemmy is we have a open source algorithm to decide how content is served. If anyone can think of a better way to server content they're free to put that in.

moderators becoming more power hungry This is an issue on every platform but Lemmy is more insulated against it than reddit for two reasons. First is that we can have the same community name shared across servers. On reddit once someone gets the catchy community name they can camp it forever. On Lemmy you can just make the community somewhere else with the same name. Second, each instance can decide how it wants to moderate its communities on Lemmy ML they are OK with power hungry mods but on other instances its frowned upon. On reddit its ignored completely.

One thing that makes Lemmy better is that its made by the users for the users. We have the code, we have the protocol its built on. This means we can have Lemmy tailored to however we want. We are not at the whim of a massive company that only cares about profit. If I have an idea for a feature i can goto the github and suggest it, better yet if I could program it I could help build that feature. If I dont like a change that is made by the lemmy devs I can fork the project and remove the change and still interact with the rest of lemmy.

rant about eternal September, !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and the young

There is beehaw.org a very peculiar instance, they defederated from lemmy.world to preserve their unique community vibe. Fediverse enables a more fine grained approach to handle those issues.

A lot of problems are still there but there are other projects that want to address them like piefed

lemmy already has a bunch of echo chambers, I think it's inevitable from the design of a network like this where the user selects what content to view and be served

If your instance gets destroyed, there will be others to join.