I liked the positivity of the community for the most part. Reddit, to my mind, was the only largely non toxic form of social media and that will be hard to replace though I’m liking Lemmy so far.

I always liked getting into micro communities and hearing how they talked about their worlds. That might include life in obscure (relative to me) places around the world, getting into the weeds of various occupations I’ll never work in or learning about the fine details of hobbies I’ll never have. Real people having good faith conversations about highly specific things relevant to them.

It's been mentioned, but product recommendations from real consumers that weren't listicles of Amazon affiliate links primed for SEO.

All of these, pretty much like the pre-2015 Reddit.

niche communities... like random skin care and chromeos

I feel like Reddit was a fantastic DIY resource. Whenever I needed an answer to a specific problem, someone years ago would have asked that specific question. I'm hoping Lemmy becomes such a useful resource one day!

The various subs that can help you get your life in order, in the way you chose. personalfinance and/or financialindependence, whatever diet sub to help you learn how to eat better and get recipes that fit the diet, exercise subs like weightlifting or some others. Things like that can have a huge impact not just from the community encouragement, but the knowledge that they include in the sidebar, etc.

Discussions for newly released movies is a big thing that I'll still likely go to Reddit for until it is fully established here. I prefer to read what others thought about them through sites like Reddit rather than normal reviews since i always read them after having seing the film and look to see if anyone else had different interpretations or revelations i didn't do i can get more out of the film retrospectively.