Another user's unpopular opinion gets downvoted in c/UnpopularOpinion, despite them having a reasonable explanation for their thoughts. Your complaints are valid, and I wish this place was more active too. Many of the fediverse equivalents of the subreddits I enjoyed before the exodus rarely get posts or are actually abandoned, and that's if someone bothers making one at all. Even the ones that are active still get a small fraction of the discussion that their subreddit would get. Also, there's more fracturing and inter-community drama, with instances fully defederalizing with other insances because of problems with certain communities there. And naturally the apps available are much less mature.

Lemmy is excellent for leftist politics, tech enthusiasts, and some other select interests. But it doesn't really let you discover things or integrate into a community well. Filtering out things that I have little interest in leaves very little, whereas Reddit was big enough for me to be very picky in flitering while still including all kinds of niche things in my custom feed. I still often search for reddit posts if I want to learn from an informed community perspective or get a guide for something.

I hope more people give this a chance, because it really does avoid issues with company-owned social media, but I guess it's hard for people to overcome inertia and make the switch.