Warning: This is a rant.
I don't really know how to describe it but the content isn't quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn't quite seem as 'normal' as what I'm used to from reddit.
There's a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn't toxic.. just saying). Random conversations go into: "omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service." Then we have the 'if we don't defederate with Meta the world ends' conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse.. maybe it will make it more normalized..idk. Then the: "if your app isn't open source its awful and terrible for the world" people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn't quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn't stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn't such assholes and this whole thing didn't happen the way it did.
I'm completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that's to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don't hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
What you're experiencing I think is completely normal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Reddit is mainstream, and Lemmy is not. Hypothetically, you might find, say, your plumber on Reddit, who casually browses in down time. The most normal user probably just uses a browser or the normal app; they may have very little or no knowledge about the reddit blackouts, what's happening, and why.
Maybe some users were using third party apps and know what happened, but if they don't care much about the reasons they might just stop using Reddit or settle with the native app. This category of users and the last are all probably making up a large part of the user base in general, and of the non-tech (normal?) Subreddits in particular.
The users who migrated to Lemmy by this point will be pretty much a reversal of Reddit's dynamic. The majority will be privacy/tech minded and have moved specifically in protest to Reddit's corporate/capitalist practices. They are here hoping to disrupt the norm and prove that we don't require a centralized power system to run social media.
Then there are probably a minority of users who are simply curious because they heard about an alternative and wanted to see what this is all about. A lot of these users probably don't stick around if they don't see the kind of stuff they want to see.
Out of any groups, only a small portion will provide content, and a slightly larger portion will take part in discussion. Memes are the easiest content to produce and to consume, so that's probably why they're so prevalent.
Personally I enjoy the conversation around privacy, FOSS, etc, but I do truly hope we'll start to see more of the normal communities develop here. Particularly I miss some of the creative writing communities which I know for sure haven't really transferred off of Reddit by this point.
And then there's a small subset who is tech adjacent, kind of understands what's going on, and is fed up with Reddit's CEO being a dick. 😅 I genuinely like Lemmy and try to understand the techy posts.
Yup, this (lemmy/fediverse) feels like Reddit 14 years ago. I joined about a year before the Digg migration and it was a very focused forum (mostly tech and science focused because nerds), but about 2ish years post Digg publicly shitting its pants there were more general/mainstream communities and it really started gaining traction.
We are still in the infancy of the Fediverse, as seen by the current state of apps/mobile, but we have a far more tech savvy generation using the internet. That, coupled with apps rapidly evolving/making the fediverse more accessible I think we will see a large influx in the coming months.