I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.

To be fair, Mastodon is still growing and it's much easier to use now than a year ago. Reddit didn't uproot Digg overnight.

Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I'm grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.

Eh. They_were_ until about 4(?) years ago. I noticed there was a big shift when all of a sudden nobody cared about spelling and grammar mistakes anymore, and Reddit itself started changing to be more average-person minded. But in the beginning absolutely yes, that's why the format was the way it was