is Lemmy the most popular 'Reddit Alternative'?

Sure it does - it doesn't really make sense to separate Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin as separate Reddit alternatives, since you can generally access the same stuff from all three of them. Although arguably it would make sense to say "the threadiverse" since most of the other fediverse software isn't really Reddit-like.

That's not great but not terrible.

Another corporate platform whose goal is to make its owners rich. It might look good in the early days when they need to attract users, but once they gain dominance, they will start to extract more and more value from you, just like Reddit is doing. And if they don’t reach that critical mass of users, it will simply fail. There is simply no pathway for a healthy, sustainable platform under corporate ownership.

The nature of walled gardens greatly limits user bargaining power, allowing owners greater latitude in abusing their users. This is why the fediverse is a much better model. And why I’m here even though I think the Lemmy developers are just as despicable as the people who started Reddit and Digg.

The main ones for me are

It's got on boarding and de-duplication, on PieFed if I view eg. this post https://piefed.social/post/749818#comment_6102866

It combines/aggregates it with cross-posts/reposts
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Subjectively speaking, after switching to Piefed I feel like "the internet is back".

Engaging conversation, good tools for filtering the front page to your liking, and the audience seems generally speaking more mature. I do expect that to change if the platform grows in size.

I'm actually okay with it. All of the insufferable people appear to be on bsky (all of the Twitter converts) and all the really interesting people are on Mastodon. Bsky is also full of AI slop.

Mastodon needs a UI that better facilitates on-ramping people new to the platform. I tried it a few times and it just felt like work finding people to follow.

Bsky on the other hand is a twitter clone and so people leaving twitter really don’t need to rework their understanding of how to use the platform.

I don’t like Bsky though so I don’t use either of them.

Less people on Mastodon, to me, means that the Mastodon community is more purposeful across their instances. Less bloat/spam/etc

Yep.

That's sort of its whole point, yes

Yeah I wanted to check for that but didn't find it in ~60 seconds of clicking around

But your question prompted me to ask Perplexity, who said:

Estimating the active number of users on Dreaddit (usually called "Dread"), the darknet's Reddit-style forum, is challenging due to the platform's anonymous and illicit nature. However, several reputable reports, including cybersecurity analyses and investigative journalism, provide the most credible figures currently available:

User Estimates: As of late 2023, Dreaddit/Dread reportedly surpassed 200,000 registered users. This figure comes from contemporary cyber intelligence briefings and video analyses, which note that while this community size does not rival mainstream platforms, it is substantial for a darknet forum accessible only via Tor or I2P.

Growth and Activity: Dread reached 12,000 users within its first three months in 2018, and by June 2018, it cited 14,683 users. Since then, significant growth has occurred, with user counts likely fluctuating in response to cybercrime trends, law enforcement actions, and DDoS attacks, but reliable reporting indicates the active number has stabilized in the six-figure range since 2022.

n++

n=3

Is there a way to migrate a Lemmy account to it?

ai built in, forced ai tldrs you cant turn off, daily leaderboards for top posters/commenters

Fucking barf. They're gonna breed an even more toxic culture than reddit with that bullshit.

If you thought karma removed was bad when they just had a number to chase, imagine how bad it will be when you have direct visibility of your competition on being the biggest karma removed in town...

It is NOT difficult to build a superior product right now. But you're battling the legal side of Big Tech's takeover to get infrastructure/marketing. Enshittification demands that the people can't find the incentive or will to leave, and were firmly there as society.

Ah you got the early access for a couple bucks? I'm bummed I missed the window.

I have a lot of things to say having been in the software, journalism domain and thought heavily about conceptualizing what such a platform may look like for the betterment of society. Jimmy Wales has been trying, too. Was on their discord for a bit but I was a little skeptical of their direction, even if noble.

I'll keep a foot in both; for as much as I like Lemmy, its marketing and intuitiveness blows and will sadly likely forever remain niche. That has its qualities, but also its downsides.