Lemmy offers a great deal of freedom - to an instance admin, and to a lesser but still high degree a moderator (e.g. their decisions are immediate, final, and unquestioned unless overturned by a higher authority) - though a lot less to an end-user. Reddit offers things like the modmail, notifications of events, and I can only guess that people are not aware of the level of censorship that has become more common lately. Meh, but if that's how they want things, then perhaps we here would prefer that they remain over there as well:-P.

As in, perhaps they simply prefer the gilded cage to the level of effort required here to be truly free.