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.
to me, it was surprising just how easy the fediverse was to understand if i stopped trying to think about it how i was taught to think by centralized platforms.
at first, i was really hesitant to migrate. i was confused by kbin, lemmy, mastodon, and especially the fediverse. i didn't think i could ever understand it. i wasn't confident in it. but, after a few hours of exploring, interacting, watching people talk about it and reading explanations, it clicked into place and suddenly made sense, a whole lotta sense. now, i am actually teaching others about what the fediverse is with little to no trouble and helping them migrate to kbin from reddit, and thats amazing. having tons of fun here! ๐