If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
You don’t have voting privacy here on Lemmy though, and theoretically instance admins could “punish” you based on voting patterns.
But decentralization helps that
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.