The thing is that "normies"(I hate the term) weren't on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.

So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.

I've seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way

1. In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
2. Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.

I see people in that thread recommending to avoid lemmy.ml - what’s up with that?!?

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics

Lol we have that now... just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.

But to be serious I do think we're heading that way, but it's going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).

That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it's not like there's any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

I'd be surprised if there's ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it's more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it'll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn't, and the answer to why are the stuff that 'normies' don't want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they're so unintuitive that that they'll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

I've just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I've seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real 'web dev 101' shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

an organic way.

Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/

On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on !houseplants@mander.xyz today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true

Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world for niche communities

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.