My point is, if you are going to be dealing with it anyway, why would you participate in the social network that is order of magnitudes smaller? You can access content on reddit without an account, the problem is participating alongside the community.

For all intents and purposes, since you are still locked out on lemmy from doing because of its server-centric communities regardless of which instance you choose, it boils down to the same outcome for the same desired goal - creating an alt - except with an order of magnitudes smaller reward - far less population and engagement than on reddit.

So rather than sticking to lemmy, it seems natural that people go back to their old but bigger platforms.

Federated is great for maintaining persistence of your account beyond the whims of fickle admins, but that's a tertiary problem. No one is that exited about keeping their user history, they are excited about participating with everyone else about the topic that is being discussed.

It's not worthless, but I can understand it explaining some of the decreasing population numbers if they encounter it even just once after months of participating on the platform because of how disruptive it is. No one is normally going to stick around a community when only the fraction of the local users in your own lemmy instance can view it.