I only found out about Lemmy when looking for reddit alternatives over the API drama.
It was probably a long time coming for me as over the years reddit has been less and less of a community and more business-like. I very much enjoy the decentralized nature of Lemmy and I really hope the Fediverse catches on at a wide scale.
It’s definitely feeling barren, it took me about a week to understand Lemmy, and how it works. Not that I understand it, I see it potential, we just gotta get over the hump.
Reddit has made it hard to link to Lemmy, I’ve tried posting to different subreddits linking to their Lemmy alternatives, and Reddit now automatically deletes those posts. Hence another reason to move away from Reddit.
My biggest concern is casual Reddit users keeping Reddit alive, I anticipate Reddit will take over the private subreddits and make them public again. As long as Reddit comes up in peoples google searches, it will be a more active community than Lemmy.
There are enough people to keep Lemmy thriving however, it just won’t be as publically known as Reddit.
They’ve started removing posts about Lemmy? That’s terrible!