Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
Reddit's burst of users from digg though was on top of an established site with a reasonable userbase. How many people were using lemmy before spez decided that Twitter was a role model instead of a cautionary tale?
I don't think so. I remember there were hundreds of upvotes when I first moved. It was a big thread if it had 1k upvotes. In seeing that on lemmy now.
Those numbers didn't dramatically change after the Digg migration though. The internet archive has copies of reddit's front page both before and after Digg's explosion and they don't show dramatically different numbers of votes on the top posts. Please don't mistake me for saying that no one actually moved from Digg to reddit, I'm just saying that reddit had an established and significant userbase even before Digg fucked around and found out. I don't think the same is quite true for lemmy.
Ya and I'd say lemmy has a significant user base too prior to Reddit. Either way I see more on lemmy now than I ever have. I've used it in the past for a while and it's night and day better now, and I attribute that to Reddit imploding