this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I'm not sure yet. Lemmy will end up being fine for lurking cool memes and seeing pictures of whales or whatever, but reddit's massive userbase was always the draw (and the curse). I asked a question about how to install a particular air intake vent in my home and reddit is big enough that somebody was able to answer that (and correctly). Lemmy is nowhere near that big yet. Not even close. Won't be close for a long time, if ever.
And that's just active users. Lemmy is missing the staggering volume of already-answered questions in the past, for every subject I could imagine. And it never will have those unless they're painstakingly ported over, and there frankly aren't enough users to do that even if we wanted to.
In short, day to day I think I'm good on Lemmy but it's a terrible shame that all those users and all those comment threads are wasted on that shitty company.
I agree that the depth and size of userbase is key. I don't think its unrealistic to expect lemmy to have a better commenter to reader ratio, so we don't necessarily need the scale of reddit.... but I do agree more than is here now.
The coming weeks will determine the long-term course of Lemmy, I think. My encouragement to people is "read on reddit if you must, but only post to lemmy/kbin/federated". That is easier to hold to than a "no reddit" diet, and it will starve reddit in the long-term. Its more realistic to get posters to stop posting to reddit than to get readers to stop reading. YMMV.