For me, that's not the case. I enjoyed the amount of content and discussion, but I just lost interest in reddit over time.

I saw the same jokes too often. I got sick of seeing the ads. The admins perma-banned my fiancee's account, despite her never really commenting or posting. They never gave a reason for banning her, other than going against "policy", which they never specified when asked. It would be the equivilant of being banned from every single instance. Some of the "helpful" communities were becoming much more toxic over time. I stayed despite that stuff.

Then, the API thing happened. It wasn't that reddit wanted to profit, but rather how they went about it. Had they been honest with the developers when they asked at the start of the contract year, it would have been much smoother. You can't change the cost of a yearly subscription halfway through the year. I disliked the provable false rumors that were spread about developers.

I disliked that Spez heavily implied that people leaving reddit would harm reddit employees. He didn't make that statement about someone who made those threats, but instead he made it about the people leaving. It left a very bad taste in my mouth. I'm not monetarily supporting someone like that if I have any say in the matter.

I disliked the sudden overwhelming toxicity that I saw start against people who were recommending Lemmy. I get being rude to people who are rude, but it's lame to be rude just because. Someone told me that I would be back, that I should just wait to see them right. That person helped me stay off reddit, tbh.

I don't understand fanaticism, regardless of the company/platform/group, etc. If I start to dislike a social media, I will move somewhere that I like better. If Lemmy becomes like what Reddit is today, I'll leave Lemmy too. There's always something else. I also don't really care if Reddit sinks or swims. That has nothing to do with me. If I get sick of all social media, I won't use it. There are lots of other things to do with free time.

Not really what I was talking about, but ok.

the growing pains are necessary, as it was for every other platform before. but this one being FOSS and decentralized means, after it's gone through that rite of passage, it'll be in a much better position for serving its userbase than if it was being controlled by shareholders and profits.

better tools for seamlessly migrating communities between instances would be a godsend for the longevity of this platform, but they're still handling the foundation last time I heard

Read on one thread here about the RPi5 they took the evil route by funneling most of their stock to enterprise customers, which hurts the DIY hobbyist and end users trying to get hardware for the proposed purpose, which should be experimenting and learning.

This causes market shortage and hiking prices.

Unfortunately they'll probably hide behind that logic and keep their apps proprietary