Quite frankly I'm not on the same boat as most people. Don't get me wrong, I prefer having an alternative that can at the very least push Reddit to act with more regard for its user base. At most, it can prove to be a viable alternative to Reddit.

However, again and again I see Reddit alternatives come and go and repeat the same old formula of providing just a Reddit clone with little changes to the user journey. You still have the same old structure of communities where you post content, people commenting, and curation being determined by an upvote and downvote system.

I do realize that some level of familiarity needs to be preserved for people to be jumping from Reddit to an alternative. But when a platform is so similar (in regards to UX), I see this not only as a huge missed opportunity, but also as a sentence – a lot of Reddit’s problems stem from how the site is organized, and the fact it has devolved into a bunch of politically extreme echo chambers where dissenting opinions are distolerated and everything is a race to the bottom. An upvotes/downvotes system is a surefire way to silence moderate and reasonable voices.

On top of everything, I'm not sure I'm fully buying the fediverse model, and I'm not sure Lemmy in particular has long-term viability. What people like is having one unified account access different platforms and communities. As far as I understand Lemmy right now, it provides the opposite – a bunch of somewhat unified communities where you have to create different accounts in order to interact with each individual instance. Add to that the uncertainty of any given instance's life expectancy, and I can definitely see why the majority of people would be hesitant to give Lemmy a try. Nevertheless, it seems the Fediverse is still in its period of early adoption, and thus I don't expect it to be popular with the average Joe. It's still not September 1993.

That said, I am giving Lemmy its fair chance. Ironically, this is my first comment on here, but I definitely don't intend it to be my last. I even created an ADHD community here for serious ADHD discussions at Lemmy.world which I plan on promoting, especially since I've never been a fan of how partisan and immature r/ADHD has been (no real antagonization, just not my place). So I am also looking at Lemmy and Lemmy.world in particular as a new opportunity.

And even if it doesn't pan out, I definitely plan on spending much less time on Reddit. I already spent a lot of time these past few days unsubscribing from communities that didn't go dark not out of spite, but because I realized many of them added little value to my life and just provided an endless stream of useless or irrelevant “content”.