I have high hopes for Lemmy, but I don't think that having a lot of users is going to be a super positive thing in the long term. It'd be great if it could feel like younger Reddit for longer than younger Reddit did, you know? Stay at least a little under the radar.
Somewhat but reddit drew a lot of people in with celebrities. The people attracted to celebrities and image heavy content will be more drawn to Threads instead of Lemmy. At least imho
I think because of federation, even if lemmy blows up, smaller instances and communities will be able to exist still. Over on Mastodon, the big instances have grown up quite a bit, but there is also many thriving smaller communities that either aren't federated with the big instances, or federated very selectively to curate the community they want.
Reddit was and is impossibly easy to use. You visit the site and start scrolling. If and when you decide you want to participate you create and account and start doing so.
The barrier to entry on Lemmy is much higher. This will keep out many of the types of low effort users that would eventually turn this into reddit.
Maybe someday the fediverse will be as obvious to everyone as any other part of the internet but it's definitely not right now and it will be awhile before it is.
It definitely took me a bit to wrap my head around the fediverse, but the presence of a "main" site (in this case, Lemmy.world, or in Mastodon's Mastodon.social) has made it pretty easy for me. I hate that crypto nerds took "web3.0" because I think, in most ways, the true inter-operability of social networks is the next "web2.0"-tier step that the internet can take.