For me personally it still needs to be far bigger though. On Reddit literally every bite of news was posted and discussed for many of the hobbies I have, large or niche. Yet on Lemmy some of my interests are barely represented nevermind being a reliable source of information and news.

To be fair, this just says that Reddit traffic is down. It doesn’t say where that traffic went. I assume that most people who reduced their Reddit usage didn’t replace it with Lemmy usage. Sucks for those people!

I share your sentiment up until the last bit which feels like gate keeping. There are enough healthy discussions coming from a lot of people outside of that demographic to make me want them to follow us here. Plus it’s bad for reddit if they do. I worry about the negative effects, where quick and easy comments that are easier to digest get upvoted over well researched and thoughtful comments. But I’m hopeful that we can learn from the past and develop tools to better incentivize people to write thoughtful comments. I think the fediverse has the potential to help us avoid dumbification of content, but it also brings greater risk of creating echo chambers.