Compared to Reddits 55 million daily active and many more (400-something million, some much more) monthly active users, and facing a never-seen wave of protest, coming in a rarely-seen form that actually affects the average user, I would have expected much more for Lemmy by now.
But what isn't already may still come true. I see more potential for Lemmy & Co to overcome Reddit than I see e. g. for Mastodon to overcome Twitter, for various reasons. And one of them is that an alternative to Reddit is much less depending on one big bang migration wave than a Twitter alternative would be.
Let's count our blessings that 55 million people haven't tried to join this platform at once.
It would have a lot of severely negative effects:
Bringing over the hive mind
Bringing over the influencers and thirst traps
Crippling all or most of the current instances
Etc
Given the nature of this platform, you can generally expect slightly more technical people on average or at least people who are not afraid of trying new technologies. The average person will not want to deal with learning how instances work or how federation works. Hell, I was chatting with a good friend who is a senior programmer and he doesn't want to deal with these things.
imo if we had more here the servers couldn't scale and it'd be a black eye.
last thing we all want is chatter that it'sa crappy technology not ready for prime time. we know the reality isn't the tech lagging but rather enough tech knowledge and appetite to host more instances.
thinking slower sustained growth would probably be better for the health of f-verse(?)