What was good about reddit is that the front page could be interacted with as a quick way to burn some downtime and distract your eyeballs with cute cats or "holdmy____", or it could be interacted with as a series of rabbit holes that could easily eat up hours of time.
Beyond interacting with content, the discussion around the content was the thing that kept me coming back for 10 years, even after I abandoned Twitter and Facebook years ago.
So far, the fediverse seems like a throwback and an innovation at the same time, and I mean that in the best possible sense.