Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.

The problem is that Reddit is much bigger than Digg ever was. They are entrenched. Getting people to switch will be difficult when all we have to offer is ”Its like Reddit but way more of a clusterfuck.”

Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?

That's the biggest problem that I see for Lemmy’s future. We should be asking ourselves ”What can we do that other platforms cannot?” We cannot survive if we're just a clone of Reddit.

Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?

To be honest, I (as a techy myself) thought the same when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. Once I realized that most of the big instances are already federated anyway and that I can see all their posts when I browse All, my doubts were gone. It's really not that much of a hurdle, even for non tech savvy people.