Judging by comments it's almost entirely the lack of content on lemmy puts people off

Users love big tech. They pretend not to, but they love their shackles.

For instance, when Twitter was bought by Elon and people had that big migration wave... Mastodon was right there, a fully matured ecosystem, same or even better features... yet the majority picked Bluesky, the "features" Bluesky offered are there in Mastodon, the only difference is Bluesky is also owned by private tech bros.

Joined Lemmy about a month ago after 17 years of using Reddit. Account was deleted. A once very great haven for open discussion has turned into one of censorship inundated with bots to push propaganda. The writing was on the wall in 2015 and while its demise started slowly the rate enshitification grew.

What I don't understand is given it's inundated with bots posting/commenting to direct the narrative, what is the point of creating more obstacles for the common person to be duped. You'd think they'd want to keep it easy access to spread their "message".

A lot of the OG's have moved over. From Diggs exoduses (exodi? exodipodes?) We're always the first to move, though. Digital nomads.

And the ones that would have been on Digg had they been born a decade or more earlier.

Eventually everyone else follows us, the new platform turns to shit, and we migrate again.

I hope the open, federated nature of lemmy prevents that...or at least delays it.

Because all the porn is still there

What exactly are they waiting for?

Most of them don't know that anything else exists.

The average redditor doesn't care about any of this in my experience, they'll just take all the crap because that's what they see on all of the internet anyway

Network effect. The communities and discussions are still there. Lemmy has the infrastructure, mostly, but not the users and not the discussions at least not in anywhere near the same volume.

There's also a few seriously missing features with Lemmy, for example modmail.

I have also found, overall, as stupid and crazy as this may be, when discussing anything involving politics users on Lemmy can be almost militantly closed-minded. I find more intelligent discussions on Lemmy, but I also find more of the 'you either agree with me or you're everything that's wrong with the world' type.

They just don't know we exists, but they will eventually.

I understand that in many of the most popular subreddits (if not site-wide) mentioning Lemmy is forbidden or rewarded with a ban.

Is Piefed better? I don't like how duplicates aren't combined on Lemmy.

Either you don't think about which instance to join, and inadvertently join a conservative one. Or you do think about which instance, and it's daunting.

I share a bunch of links here from time to time and Lemmy needs communities and content. It is not an insurmountable scenario, because Reddit was also much smaller at the time of the Digg exodus. Lemmy and similar sites in the Fediverse have improved since a few years ago, back when the only topic of conversation was beans and the site ran very slowly.

its the lack of content actually. the last instance that got shut down had way more content than now, because people dont stick to one place and grow them, they just go to ever smaller and smaller communities.