

Just adding onto the good answer you already got, but the thing that made this click to me was understanding that if you’re not port forwarding, you’re limited in the connections you can make to other peers. Specifically, you can only connect to peers who are fully available. Whereas if you’re port forwarding, then you can connect both to people who are limited, and to people who are fully available.
I imagine you would get faster download speeds if you were port forwarding, but my impression is that this mainly is a factor for seeding, which matters more if you’re on a private tracker that requires a certain download/upload ratio; it’s way harder to keep that ratio above 1.0 if you’re limited in the peers you can connect to.
I find myself commenting far more often than I did on Reddit. I remember once that I lamented that Lemmy doesn’t have a “super upvote” in the way that Reddit gold used to be (which is a silly thought, given that I have never, and would never pay money to gild a comment). However, I realised that on this more discussion based platform, a short but meaningful comment can readily function as a super upvote. I think the lack of karma accrual for comments/posts also promotes this.