In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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Lemmy needs DIDs.
No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.
The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it's up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive "might not make it", and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn't a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
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Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There's been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
On this point specifically, I think this idea is good. Multiple communities sharing a pool of aggregates that can moderators opt into. Great, I don't know how feasible that is with ActivityPub, but I hope it can be worked out once the dust has settled.
However, "fragmentation" is neither a problem, nor do I feel exists as things currently stand. If different servers want to host communities around a similar topic, that's not a bad thing. On Reddit, you had Gaming, Games, Truegaming, etc. They're all about playing games, video or otherwise, yet if you look at them at all you'll see they cater to almost completely different audiences. I don't NOT want ultra dominate monolithic groups. I think if their existed a single "Technology" community then that would be a failure of the fediverse.
Right now is a period of extremes, so don't evaluate communities too harshly. In the long run, I want to see dozens, maybe hundreds of small communities that maybe don't get a huge amount of traffic, but are none the less, active and interesting.