Im very excited for Lemmy. It seems a bit rough around the edges, but I'm very hopeful for it. That being said...
Please stop talking about reddit. If you want this to be the next reddit, I beg of you to stop mentioning it. Otherwise all this placewill be is a temporary hold over until we all just fall back on what we know cause we keep hammering in the name into our brain over and over again. I think the same sort of thing happened with the original "black out" of Twitter but we all came back to it because we kept thinking of Twitter in regards to whatever new site we tried. If you want Lemmy to succeed, let Lemmy be Lemmy
Fundimentally, as long as people get enough content to last their commute/poop/lunch break without crawling back to reddit for additional memes, Lemmy will be in a good position to make it.
But I agree with you, discussions about reddit don't make for good content for everyone in a sustainable way. Those discussions I'd wager appeal most to the true believers who left on principle, not the average user.
As of right now, I'm finding Lemmy has more than enough content for my daily browsing. However, that's because I took a few hours last month scouring as many instances as possible for the highest usercount communities that I wanted to get in my feed.
Reddit has a decent default sub list, and that's what's going to push new people away from Lemmy imo. I was frustrated enough with Spez to ditch reddit and dedicate a few hours to making this my new home.
Lots of people aren't going to want to put that effort in, especially when their feed at Reddit was not effected by any of the changes made.
Reddit ditched default subs years ago but it would maybe be a good thing for the big Lemmy instances to replicate in some way until it can get big enough. Finding communities is a challenge unless you’re really committed. The all feed is like 85% Reddit discussion.
If you create a new reddit account you receive curated content from day one is the point. I've also been a oldreddit user so I didn't even know default subs went away lol.
I also set my Lemmy default to new comments, subscribed/local cause all is buggy AF it seems(d).
The problem with this kind of decisions is that there are some people that want the fediverse to remain somehow underground, which would drive some people away from it.
As for the Reddit talk, I reckon it’s expected given how much people is coming expecting to get the Reddit experience. However, I believe the dust will settle as the time passes, and everyone will start to see Lemmy as its own thing.
A similar thing happens at Mastodon every time there’s a new influx of users. People want to have a familiar experience, and that’s normal.