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Once I figured out how to make lemmy look a lot like what I was getting from Reddit and HN, I haven't been back to either. Now I have a single RSS feed in my reader to my personal Subscribed/Active page. The RSS link you can get from your instances website while logged in includes some kind of ID to your personal feed so there's no authentication needed and I never have to change anything there, if I join a new community, it starts showing up in my RSS reader, if I unjoin, it goes away. It's quite glorious. I've found good/active enough communities to replace what I followed at the old places and the comments sections are far less flooded with nonsense.
I'm on Mastodon a bit, and I do really like it, but it wasn't a replacement for me, I was off Twitter and the like for about 7 years already when I decided to try it.
RSS was all I could've ever asked for back then. And then it was gone.
Reddit and HN still have RSS. Are you referring to other sites? I quit all the other ones long ago.