I mean third party apps have had over a decade more time to get polished in comparison to the Lemmy options. I’m not really optimistic that Lemmy is a true competitor to reddit. While I, personally, no longer want to support reddit, only a tiny fraction of reddit’s user base has made the switch to Lemmy, and if you go over to reddit right now, not much has changed. Posts are still getting orders of magnitude more interactions than posts here. Some mods will leave but people will eagerly replace them. I also think Lemmy is inherently a little difficult to understand. I’m pretty tech savvy and I had issues figuring it out. The average user is going to struggle a lot which is bad for becoming more widespread.
I disagree. The obscure subs is what I really loved about reddit. Subreddits based on niche hobbies have a much wider userbase from reddit to pull from while you won’t have nearly as many people over here. Overall I’m looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow some more but I think lacking active discussion in some of the more niche communities will make it a little more boring for me than reddit was.