I don’t see Old Reddit lasting long. They’ve cut beloved features before, and they’re still calling New Reddit a “beta feature”. After they’ve pumped enough resources into developing it, I’m sure they’ll move past the “test” phase and just cut Old Reddit out entirely. That’s probably going to be Lemmy’s next big user surge.
Does Reddit suppress mentioning Lemmy? I remember for a while this past June 2023 there were a lot of auto-deletions for mentioning or linking to Lemmy. I was never clear on who was deleting things and where. I guess linking to the r/Lemmy subreddit (or a fediverse sub) could work as long as the subreddit doesn’t get banned.
That’s exactly what I did with a fairly niche community, and so far we’ve got 400+ subscribers in only four months. Pretty good for Lemmy, I think.
TBF, I think part of why it took off so well is because Lemmy’s ALL stream is relatively slow enough such that small niche communities have a much higher chance of being randomly seen. Compare that to Reddit, where they’d typically be buried.
So there’s a prime opportunity right now to start a community on Lemmy and have it take off relatively easily. That might not be so true in future.