After many years of Reddit I made the step today and uninstalled my reddit app. If Lemmy works out I will completely migrate here. The idea of the a Fediverse based place such as this one feels promising.
Now I am wondering, are you all also planning on staying here, do you mainly use Lemmy temporarily, or do you want to use Lemmy in addition to Reddit in the future?
The main barrier here, I think, will be the general clunkiness of Lemmy. I assume it is a consequence of its federated organization, but it took me several attempts over the course a few days before Lemmy would even let me make an account.
I'm nuts, so I kept trying. But If the barrier of entry is too difficult to for most people to bother with, i'm skeptical Lemmy will be able to be truly independent of Reddit.
It will need an active core community especially in the beginning, I think.
One worry I have regarding niche communities is, that duplicate communities might spread the user base.
It does seem to be harder to find niche communities not hosted on your instance, however if at least one person is interested in the niche community on your instance then it will show up in search without having to manually seek it out
So I guess it really depends on if users on your instance have similar interests or if everyone is willing to use the lemmy community browser to go find the communities they wish to find
I'll use Reddit again if they revise their API pricing so that third-party apps don't get shut down. Otherwise, I'll probably keep using Lemmy only, unless I get bored of it and abandon Redditesque sites altogether.
I plan on staying here. In two days I haven't seen a certain annoying religious ad, rage-bait posts, no OF mailbox spam, and I've actually started commenting in threads again. I deleted my reddit app this morning and I don't even plan on logging in again to delete my account.