In practice, software is simply software, and it matters far more who your instance admins are than which software platform you use. All the more so if you use something like Voyager that replaces the front-end UI component.

And I didn’t get into it above, but Lemmy is quite opinionated as well. For instance, when you choose the option to so-called “block” an instance, what that does for you is:

1. hide post content offered to communities located on that instance

However what that so-called “block” does not do for you includes:

1. hide post content offered by users of that instance to communities on other instances
2. hide comments from those users in other communities
3. prevent such “blocked” users from sending you DMs
4. which are even allowed to trigger notifications

Thus this so-called “block” of an instance is nothing at all like a block, and acts more as a community muting.

Also, when a mod removes content it makes it disappear as if the page never existed, giving a 404 not found error afterwards (Reddit leaves the page active to anyone with the URL, even allowing conversations that were already started to continue).

Users are never notified of the event - leaving people to find out literally years later that they were banned from something, or that their content was removed, when in all that time they were not aware (Reddit sends notifications).

There is no modmail for users to contact the mods to ask for clarification - instead, Lemmy forces people to individually ask each of the mods why, e.g. via DM (Reddit has a modmail).

Even when someone goes looking in the modlog to find out why their content was removed, it often says that it was done simply by a “mod”.

Instance admins have supreme rights, community mods have a bit less so, but end-users have next to none at all. Even Reddit offers more rights to end-users than Lemmy does!!! Authoritarian practices are baked right into the Lemmy codebase.