I am pretty sure most people are here for idealogical reasons so lack of things is a nothing burger for them.

Normies only care about ease of use and network effect. Until fediverse brings usability, we aint even compete for the network.

1. the post already said why:

I would love to move away from reddit but it's hard when this is where the base of my favorite communities still exists.

2. further compounded by issues such as (a) overall lack of moderation, which further depends on (b) better development of moderation tools, and (c) guides explaining how things work, bc it can be fairly confusing, e.g.:

How do I find selfhosted communities on Lemmy? If I search for "selfhosted" I get one community (Run It Yourself) with around 3K subscribers and very little activity. Is that it?

Though someone answered (I think incorrectly):

I think the biggest one is 40k on lemmy.world and it's called "selfhosted". You must be on a Lemmy server that doesn't show that community for some reason. There are ideological rifts on Lemmy that can cause some servers to splinter like that.

Interestingly, from my old instance discuss online, I see no hits at all to that term among community names - https://discuss.online/search?q=selfhosted&type=Communities&listingType=Local - meaning that nobody from that instance has subscribed to it yet.

Which is why things like Categories of Communities (already fully functional on PieFed) are so helpful to guide people to what they may be looking for.

3. And I haven't even begun on the whole tankies connotation of moving here.

I think it's clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit.

No - apparently not, it's only clear to you, not them, for all the reasons listed above and likely more besides. We would have to build it first, before they will come... and even then I would expect a long delay. In the meantime, Lemmy MAUs (Monthly Active Users) are actively declining, whether they are returning their traffic to Reddit or not.

I can conjecture some things, though I can't be 100% sure on either:

First, maybe it's fanatics/fanboys that don't like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it's paid actors complaining. Third, it's robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.

I was just thinking about this because I've been going through and blocking every political community. I've found that when that is gone, there's really not that much left aside from random technology focused stuff, some memes, asinine twitter screenshots, and a fuck ton of linux stuff. And the comments sections of seemingly unrelated posts often devolve into political shit slinging. I'm on an instance that blocks lemmygrad and hexbear so I can imagine it's far worse for the ones that don't. I'm starting to sour on lemmy too because there's basically nothing here of interest to me anymore.

As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it's a few different reasons.

1. It's something new. Honestly is as simple as that. Most redditors are straight up threatened by new features, new looks, new anything. New Reddit is an example of that. To be fair it is hideous but it's also drastically underused according to reddits own metrics. This just stays consistently with everything. People prefer old subs to new, prefer old users to new, old memes to new. Why? Dunno. Could be as simple as just that they know it so it's comforting.

2. The propaganda that reddit put up against Lemmy was pretty insane. The first few mini-migrations set people up with weird expectations and a lot of them bounced back to reddit with weird notions. Some of it was based on shitty admins or shitty servers (cough lemmy.ml cough) but other things seemed to be almost coordinated against Lemmy. By the time that the big migration from Reddit killing off third party apps/API use a lot of people had heard one or two things and just started spreading it. Redditors often don't source material and just kinda spread rumors or 'feelings' or upvote one idiot who seems like he knows what he's talking about while blatantly lying. This has never gone away. The same idiots keep whining and being dismissive.

3. Redditors are hateful. Not purely hateful people or anything but the atmosphere encourages hate and division. I still browse reddit occasionally and I'll check the comments out about a post. It's always so bitter and angry, snapping out at one another. When every crab in the bucket is pulling you down, you get stuck in that habit too. Until you break free of reddit you don't realize just how bitter it's making you. Lemmy doesn't have those vibes and it can be really off putting to someone still in that bitterness. Kindness and people getting along almost comes off as stupid and naive so you just kinda dismiss the entirety of Lemmy as a whole.

4. This is a conspiracy but I'm positive that Reddit admins are purging a lot of references to Lemmy that don't show the site in a positive light. When the API shit was happening people kept pointing out that certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain that forced users to be logged in to read the community. A lot of people talked about how certain posts and stuff were being removed, especially ones critical of Spez. I don't think they stopped that campaign and I think they still try to demonize the hell out of Lemmy. Could be because China has a significant hand in reddit now or it could be because Spez has a tiny dick and a tinier ego. Dunno. But I think they're weighting the scales.

Lemmy has a toxic puddle problem. If your first experience with Lemmy is sauntering into a community and getting chased out for not agreeing with someone hard enough, something like that, you'll probably just go back to Reddit and say 'that place is full of whack jobs'.

And the default sort, kinda hard to dodge

Number 1 comment is

Reddit ain't going anywhere fast.

If r/selfhosted has to rely on reddit as it can't be fucked selfhosting, what chance do other subs have.

I have found Lemmy selfhosted communities excellent, they are not a large as Reddit but there are plenty knowledgeable people, often seflhosting their own little reddit.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Almost everyone in the linked Reddit post seems to be supportive of Lemmy, or even Lemmy users. Even the people who tried it and stopped seem generally warm to the idea and just think it needs polish.

I'd say that this comment section is way more vitriolic than that one lol

We are having a great time over here in the Fediverse, and they are jealous. So we will continue to have a blast, just to piss them off.

Speaking from a third-world country, there are 2 main weaknesses the fediverse has for us:

• selfhosting is not easy or cheap for us, so we can only use what it's already there... And it's basically all in english, so most people are out.
• meta has everyone grabbed by the balls and people are happy like that (for some reason), anything new or different is met with endless excuses.

There used to be a mexican instance called Mujico, but they were forced to use a whitelist by constant troll attacks... But they also federated with grad so I can't feel bad about it. I don't know if it still exists but the last time I checked it had zero activity.

Doesn't !selfhosted@lemmy.world have like 40k subscribers? Top ten Lemmy community by sub count, iirc.

Because people off Reddit hate everything that its not reddit