Selfhosted

I think it's the same in most aspects, just less developed. However, it looks like the devs lie about the benefits and use a less secure alternative to dns.

It's garbage with a funny name

...i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

Does it need to be better? Can people just share things they find interesting or that they made?

From reading the whitepaper, you basically replace instance admins with community admins, and your P2P peers will cache some of the content so you don't hit the community admin all the time. Benefits:

• lower hosting costs - you only need to pay for storage for your community, plus some transfer as comments/posts get updated on your "instance"
• risk is limited to whatever communities someone is hosting, not an entire instance
• user accounts aren't centralized, so if a community goes down, you still have your user account
• some protection against doxxing IP addresses, whereas w/ Lemmy you need to trust your instance admins

Other differences:

• moderation is selected by the community admin, there are no instance admins
• trust mechanisms (captcha and whatnot) is managed at the community level, since there is no instance level

Potential downsides:

• no ActivityPub, so it won't interact w/ the fediverse whatsoever
• affiliated w/ their own crypto token, and has ties to Ethereum NFTs and whatnot
• lots of different interfaces (4chan clone, Reddit clone, etc), which could cause distraction for devs
• uses public-key addressing instead of content addressing, so it could be slow (they propose a mitigation)

I think it's a step in the right direction in some areas, but ultimately there's just a bit too much association w/ cryptocurrencies for it to really be a long-lasting service. We'll see though, maybe my fears are unwarranted.