It sold 18 million copies within a few months of launch. It worked out immediately.

I’m probably wrong but I think because it takes a lot more user effort to navigate Lemmy and find your communities, and those communities can be spread across many instances.

It’s just easier for those that are interested in the community around those interests to use something like reddit or a specific forum site.

Lemmy is mostly tech dorks, which isn’t a bad thing but that leads to the tech and programming communities dominating the feeds. Also I think people who have been using Lemmy for a while vastly overestimate the appeal of the platform and also tech literacy of the general population. It can feel intimidating and uninviting.

There are a lot of ways they could handle it. Imagine the New York Times or similar organizations with their own customized Mastodon for live updates and Lemmy for linking to articles and for searching. Mastodon being the free to follow and the Lemmy/main site being subscription to make an account and comment.

This is really fascinating to me. It would be interesting to see each country set up their own Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/other federated systems and have those instances constantly talk to each other. Like others have commented, It seems like a great way to keep the communication style and interaction of twitter/facebook, while also protecting the validity of the information through private instances. Really smart decision.

As a reddit refugee I appreciate the quick FAQ. I have been re-reading the lemmy welcome post as I browse around and find new stuff. Mastodon is a whole other can of worms for me.