It’s important to remember reddit’s own rise to stardom was off of bad changes made to Digg which the community hated as well as off centralizing and killing off individual niche forums and also it’s free speech absolutism. So it’s not that surprising some amount of people would as reddit calcifies and enshittifies further try and make the jump to yet another alternative. We’ve seen it with kids moving from Myspace to Facebook to Instagram and Tiktok as those platforms become mainstream, become full of adults, clueless and strange boomers, and enshittify in the chase for profits, to say nothing of the web culture impulse of jumping to something different, new and exciting.

To be fair the lemmy devs were trying to grow lemmy as a replacement for reddit and did heavily advertise it not as a Marxist or leftist space but as an alternative ecosystem so we could say it’s suffering from success which is likely necessary. The lemmy devs were not going to keep their nlnet funding by remaining a niche place full of only Marxists forever and if they want to continue getting paid to develop lemmy full time and we want them to get paid a broader base of support was inevitable. At the very least they won’t hardcode in anti-left stuff which cannot be said for the owners of just about every capitalist centralized social media in existence, at best on those they’re just too cheap and lazy to censor the left or anyone else and are chasing growth so much they’ll tolerate anyone who isn’t pushing literal CSAM or ISIS propaganda.