Time will tell. Lemmy needs more users and more content. Feels like Reddit from the late 2000s right now. The demographic is mostly male/tech-literate and the only threads that get responses are tech and gaming subjects.

Some of the local subs I read have presences on Lemmy but no content. Most normies are still using Reddit.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy still doesn't have a lot of the communities I know and love on Reddit.

Never used Twitter.

There won't be.

Just go back to the Internet forums of old - many major forums back in the day were ran as small businesses with subscriptions and advertising. I hope the fediverse does allow a commercial model - we need diversity in how to fund such infrastructure. If some instance owners want to institute subscriptions or include advertising on their instances, that should be a feature that the Lemmy developers should seriously consider. Otherwise, it's hard to scale a service like this on donations alone.

Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There's no conspiracy here to break federation.