I couldn't have said it better.

I haven't seen that much of a problem on Lemmy.ml, so I think you really have to dig down into it to find the dirt. I think some people have a problem with the admins political views, so they try to smear them any chance they can. But those same admin made lemmygrad as a place to kinda keep all that stuff separate from the main instance.

Sure, it seeps over sometimes, but the bulk of the content on lemmy.ml is just standard shit. Reddit was no different. Most subreddits were normal and there were a few ones that were full of imbalanced idiots. That didn't make people leave the site completely. We just didn't sub to the subreddits we didn't like. In a similar vein, just block the communities here that you don't want to see.

As far as the "too many communities" discussion goes... we're never going to win that battle. The majority of people out there aren't willing to make the change to the fediverse because of this one issue. Most likely a true Reddit alternative will be made and most normies will move there in time.

It's great that Lemmy has gained some popularity, but there are too many issues here for it ever to become as big as something like Reddit.