Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
I reckon after all is said and done, the biggest issue I had with Reddit is that people felt they had to be heard. Like, we just needed to know that you also thought that certain thing (“came here to say this”) or that you are morally superior to everyone else (“oh but I don’t do it that way OP”). It’s 90% of the reason the content on Reddit had deteriorated, because people crave the attention, and thus the imaginary number going up.
Now I’m not saying Lemmy is different. In fact, I fully expect it to go the same way. But right now, there are far fewer people here who just have to give their opinion (I see the irony), and therefore less shit to wade through to get to actually good content.
As an example, look at the top comment on any default sub post on Reddit. It will have heaps and heaps of replies that are just valueless crap. This is what makes Reddit seem “faster” than Lemmy. The reality is that most of it is fluff, most of it is irrelevant to you.