Non-ideologically: the culture is measurably better. Here’s why.

• The Lemmy Algorithm. This is a big flaw with Reddit – people have the attention span for the first ten comments, and then subcomment upvotes halve (with decent std. dev – we aren’t Zipf’s Law devotees there) until invisibility. I don’t think my Reddit comments are even seen, let alone replied to. But here, new comments have a chance.
• The sense of “mineness”. A lot of people see this place as “their own”, so there’s responsibility to raise your communities right, and another to interact (hence, variably lower hostility). I don’t post much but I respond a lot to the people who comment in them, because I feel that it’d be nice to contribute to do my part and keep this place up.
• At risk of sounding self-absorbed/elitist, the entry level helps culture too. People are here because they were dissatisfied with the state of other sites, then made a jump; this is a sieve that to an extent increases the standard of sorting by new. (This has limitations of course – we still have extremists for example – and it isn’t necessarily advocating for Lemmy to never be mainstream.)

e.g. that Draw a Duck post a while back is probably far beyond a lot of platforms’ capabilities/proclivities.

(I admit: this is a paraphrased comment I made a few months ago)