So far I like it and therefore do not look around for alternatives.
I only hope that it will not remain with the first wave of Reddit migrants but will continue in the coming months and years. Currently, it is still very quiet for my taste, but this is also completely normal.
The only thing that worries me a little is the distribution of the communities.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the same community (Like a Subreddit) on different servers. This provides for an unnecessary segmentation of the already not large userbase.
So instead of having one big community for a Topic we have many small ones. This is especially a problem at the beginning, when the userbase is still small.
I’m curious to see how this develops over time. Whether the popular communities will agree on one main instance, or whether apps will reduce the problem to the extent that communities with the same names are combined. It will be exciting to see in any case.
I think you have to look at it from the point of view of people who are less technically skilled. The hurdle of Lemmy versus Reddit is greater anyway because the structure is more unfamiliar and complex.
And as a “new” platform you also have a chicken-and-egg situation that you have to overcome.
Imagine you don’t know Reddit and someone sends you a link to a subreddit for a topic that interests you. You see many members and a lively exchange. This makes it interesting and you subscribe/follow it and in the best case participate.
Now imagine someone sends you a link to a Lemmy community for a topic that interests you. Since the userbase is already much smaller, there will be much less going on there. If you now also splitting things up, it will look even less alive than its really is. And that makes it less attractive for most people and they leave.
If you had one big community instead of many smaller ones for a topic, the chance of faster growth would be higher.
As I said, always from the perspective of someone who is not clear about the concept and may not see that there is actually a much larger number of users for the topic.
I can understand why you like the concept, I’m not saying it’s bad in principle. But in my option the most important thing for Lemmy is to quickly become attractive for a large number of people.
And since most users would rather join an already alive platform than build something from scratch, the last thing you want is to make things look smaller/less alive than they are.