I discovered lemmy back when reddit started to charge for their API. However upon taking a look at it, it seemed that apart from like 8 communities,there was not much going on elsewhere. Things seem to have changed since then, quite a lot of active communities these days. So how many users do yall reckon lemmy has now? Is it close to 5M? or perhaps even higher?
Microblogging is about individuals while lemmy is about topics.
With the former, unless you involve algorithmic recommendations or recommendation lists like bluesky, its going to be a lot of work for users to get a nice feed from just following individual people.
With the latter, the things i mentioned are basically built into the system so its easier to get a lively experience even with much fewer users.
My experience goes against this position.
Between quite a few really active users and the ability to follow hashtags I have had a very active timeline almost since day 1 in Mastodon.
To put it in comparison, I find it hard to keep up with the Masto timeline while my 6-hour best sorting starts quickly showing a ton of doubles (wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow make them go away? )
In Thunder you can at least disable showing crossposts which should remove a lot of duplicates.