I want to offer another perspective on the concept of a federated network and data accessibility. Previously, Reddit held complete control over the data and recently restricted access to its API. In contrast, Lemmy operates on a federated model where your posts and comments are replicated across other instances that are part of the federation with your home instance.
For example, you can visit the link https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected], where the Lemmy.world server maintains a copy of the posts and comments from this instance, and any updates are replicated accordingly. Therefore, with Lemmy, rather than a single entity having exclusive control over all your data, it is available across multiple diverse instances.
Ultimately, whether the federated model in Lemmy is viewed as a positive or negative aspect depends on one's priorities and preferences regarding data ownership, redundancy, centralization, and moderation.
P.S: Soon reedit might also lock access behind a login screen like what twitter did.