Can you elaborate?

I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.

The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.

Regarding search engines - Brave Search cured my Google-hopping. Great results, almost zero blogspam. It does support the same bang syntax as DDG, if you want to redirect your search.

Depending on what you’re searching for it also has a “Discussions” section near the top of the results page so that you don’t even have to append “reddit” or “stack overflow” to your query to find normal people opinions - they only need to add Lemmy to it now ;)