While I agree that federation currently works against Lemmy, and I've written to that effect before (Though I think most such issues can eventually be fixed on the software side), I still disagree that there are plenty of users. The entire active userbase of Lemmy is still fewer people than are subscribed to /r/Montana. /r/AskReddit alone currently has more unique people on it at the time of this reply than Lemmy has had in the last month.

So that's our problem: We're trying to take the amount of people who might browse /r/AskReddit at its peak on a Wednesday, and using just them trying to rebuild everything on reddit. The userbase here is spread too thin. Federation is artificially spreading them even thinner, but even without it we'd still be desperately in need of new users.