Here’s my take.
Don’t worry about the Reddit people. Don’t think you, we, have to make Lemmy into something because Reddit still exists and we want all those people to come over here. Don’t try to make this place a ‘better Reddit’. Let it be Lemmy. Let all that handle itself.
When Felon screwed up Twitter, Mastodon bent over backwards in the attempt to lift and shift Twitter people over to Mastodon, but the people who loved Twitter really didn’t stick, because they needed the artificially driven engagement and numbers that were blown out of proportion by bot and NPC participation. They went over to Mastodon and were like ‘uh, this ain’t it’ and they went on their way – and that was a feature, not a bug. The ones who stayed, stayed because Mastodon was different from Twitter – and we loved the differences once we got used to them. That was also a feature, not a bug.
There will likely be several platforms, open source, closed source, volunteer led or corporate, who try to capture Reddit emigres. People will end up picking the one they like best because they like it best. For me, as someone who has been on Reddit since the very early days, there was a lot to like there and also a lot to dislike. And to me, there were a lot of people in Reddit who I’d just as soon found a different home that suited their likes and dislikes instead of having a huge captive population lift and shift over here and spend the next god knows how long trying to turn Lemmy into what Reddit was. If this place never get 20% the size of Reddit, but you end up getting more meaningful engagement here the way one does at Mastodon vis a vis Twitter, to me that’s not just a win but a big win.
Two cents, yours to keep.
so they’re going to e_rat_icate them?