To me, it was the astounding amount of interactivity between the community.
At first I thought this was temporarily caused by the whole migration from the R site. But, just out of curiosity, I signed up to Mastodon and have enjoyed myself just as much as here.
Most of the Lemmy post’s / Mastodon toots have almost as much or more comments / boosts than upvotes or favorites. It feels so organic and makes me realize how much these huge companies employ technics to pretty much force to interact the way they see fit.
It reminds me of that good old saying “you are not immune to propaganda”, well I guess neither I nor anyone is immune to psychological tricks either.
P.S. I also love the fact that since there isn’t pretty much any money involved, most opinions and interactions are genuine. Like, who is gonna pay this dude to advertise a book through BookWyrm? That increases immensely the odds that said person is being honest with their opinion of that book. It’s amazing.
Two positive surprise features which are very useful in long and complex comment chains:
Comments to other comments get a colored bar on the left. Color depends on indent which makes it easy to find comments of same ident even over long vertical distances.
Super long comment chains can be continued on the same page.
Federation and defederation has much more complex implications than I thought: lemmy.world: How the beehaw defederation affects us