I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might've been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months.
At first Lemmy was exciting because it was so active. There were so many new users who were enthusiastic about turning this platform into a genuine alternative. There was a communal effort to create and interact with content, and for awhile it worked. Lemmy was truly interesting during the summer of last year. However, this stream of dedicated users started to slowly decline.
A lot of people hoped that if they were active, they would attract and retain more users to this place to the point where the community would foster interest specific communities like Reddit, but that never happened. After a few months, a lot of users lost interest and went back to Reddit where the userbase is so massive that there is an active community for just about anything.
With this reverse exodus back to Reddit, Lemmy ended up with the same groups that were active on it before hand: political extremists, tech nerds, privacy enthusiasts, and shitposters. To be fair, all these groups are larger now than they were a year ago, but that's all this platform has to offer. If you're into any of these things and primarly these things then Lemmy can be a good alternative to Reddit, but for the general masses? Lemmy is just not good.
For example, a NBA post on the NBA subreddit can get you thousands of interactions in a couple of hours. An NBA post on here will maybe get you a dozen over the course of a couple of days. The only content that will gain any traction here are tech news, political propaganda, and maybe some memes. I don't see this changing any time soon. Even if Reddit implodes, I still think Lemmy will remain a niche platform. I think this evident by the fact that this platform hasn't really progressed in a year.
Lemmy wasn't ready and still mostly not ready for a mass Reddit exodus. The Reddit API fiasco wasn't anticipated by anybody and the large influx of users exposed a ton of bugs and federation issues.
But it's not a failure, yet. I'm sure Reddit had growing pains after the Digg exodus too. Some platforms take years to become popular. Reddit was small for quite a while before it became more mainstream.
In a way to me Lemmy feels a bit like Reddit must have been a few years before I joined it 12 years ago.
The problem is the expectation that Lemmy could replace Reddit overnight, and would immediately be a 1:1 replacement.
Although personally I like it more here, and I get more interactions than Reddit. But I am a tech nerd, so.
I was on reddit slightly before subreddits were added as functionality, so 16ish years, and lemmy to me just feels like that 2008ish reddit except most of the userbase is 40 instead of 18
I prefer the older user base. I'm 30 and I don't feel out of place here
I like Lemmy especially because it has not gone mainstream. I was already disliking Reddit around 2016/7 and tried to find alternatives, but nothing was good enough for me. Around 2018/9, the porn subs got pretty popular, then WallStreetBets. That brought on a massive amount of users, and the Reddit I joined in 2011 was definitely gone.
It used to be interesting, unique, and respectful.It became repetitive, predictably standard, and rude. Many subs function as low-key advertising or propaganda without users awareness. It was a hive mind. I was wanting to leave, and luckily the API fiasco happened so that I was able to find a new place.
I like it small like it is now. Users feel more familiar. Also, I love the idea of instances. If one instance has a shitty community on a topic you like, then find a community on a different instance. There's none of that BS where mods control an entire topic. Maybe there are a lot of topics that aren't popular here, so that sucks. Still, it's no worse than reddit with 1+ million people all saying the same crap I don't vibe with on a topic.