The problem is that the average user on Reddit doesn’t give a fuck about the ways the platform is shooting itself in the foot, because it’s still functional, has a critical mass of users, and is still the de facto online global discussion forum.

Lemmy doesn’t serve the function well enough because there are not enough of a variety of users driving niche topics. It’s the same dozen topics I see every day. Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over knowing that’s just what the current userbase enjoys discussing. It also doesn’t help that the development team tacitly endorses the extremist propaganda spreading behavior on their server. You can go check mod and vote logs and see the development team actively encouraging all of this destructive behavior across the fediverse.