I really like lemmy too. I think the biggest issue is that people think of Lemmy itself as the replacement of reddit.com. But what makes more sense to me is thinking about Lemmy as a tool to build separate websites that are each a replacement for reddit.com and that these can interoperate with each other to grow based on the local users interests. I think the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account... it's just not intuitive and of course the more established sites shut down signups during mass waves as an anti-September protective measure.

I ended up starting at programming.dev because someone on HN mentioned it and it at least seemed to have a focus and also wasn't a ghost town. And that was pretty good but I've also joined beehaw (takes some time) because I like its size and decorum and generically would choose to get on their side of a defederation. And after I'm starting to understand how this whole activity pub and defederation and federation works, I really am optimistic about it.

I think somebody needs to build something that's a crossover between GitHub pages and activitypub that sort of behaves like discus and integrates with Lemmy/kbin/mastodon. So that blog writers can have comments at their own sites again and they can integrate together to grow organically. I haven't quite pieced it all together, but I sort of see that could grow as a replacement for what we lost with Google Reader and the loss of blog commenting communities.