This is my take on Lemmy as well. I was impacted by the removal of third party apps because I used Reddit as a mobile quick reader between activities where the bite-sized format of title -> elaboration -> brief discussion was great, but maybe a little too much. On Lemmy I don’t feel the need to keep reading. This also means I wasn’t invested enough in Reddit, so when they made clear their disdain for the users, I simply left. Nothing there is important enough to keep going.

Lemmy is definitely lower quality though. All is primarily single topic outrage and there is a significant amount of extreme rhetoric that makes me feel like I’ll be put on a list for reading, which would have been removed on Reddit for lack of civility or worse. The niche things don’t exist and, even if I wasn’t a bite-sized mobile user and had the time or thoughts to form a community, these Reddit clones are always most active at political… discussion users can’t express elsewhere and that tends to kill the niche hobbyists who don’t want to look at or be surrounded by that type of passion. So it’s difficult to curate a personal feed of anything but that.

Lemmy still works for my use case and it’s about the next best thing to Reddit. I do think the “circlejerk” feeling is contributing to the decline though, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up like Voat.