Lemmy is the only fediverse community that works ideally as a “replacement” for reddit through the inherent nature of reddit itself. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Diaspora, Friendica, peertube, Matrix, etc. None of these live up to the requirement to work as a replacement for their respective community.

One of the major problems, i find, is that people actually want some level of spam coming their way, and to spam others. i.e. every artist knows that Twitter is the place to spread your art - and unfortunately, it cannot be done on Mastodon. Mastodon lacks both the community, and the features to highlight art and spread said art to its fans and viewers. Because of the lack of tools to get to your base on the fediverse (for privacy reasons), many people simply cannot jump to the platform without losing the ability to maintain their spread (and income), or the utility they need, in order to continue operating their communities. This is not to mention the problematic nature of how people use things. i.e. Facebook has an atrocious “forum” platform they call “groups”, people hate it, but they still opt to use Facebook’s groups rather than a proper forum or a reddit/lemmy sub for their community; and this is because they’re already on facebook as it is, because everything is on facebook, chat, group interests, shopping, business sites, business support chats, relevant ads, local and otherwise - everything is just there, and people will always take the path of least resistance even if it sort-of sucks (and believe me, i hate it more than most, as i work with facebooks tools daily, and it kills me a bit inside each and every day for how poorly everything works, there is a myriad of bugs, no support from facebook themselves, and half the time things are just down, for weeks at a time, i finally setup my own booking system because the facebook booking system has barely worked all last year - and sadly, leaving facebook for booking means i’ve lost about 20% of my clients).

Another huge hurdle is to compete with the big names when they have so much money to blow on things that we simply can’t. i.e. facebook is huge in third world nations and essentially “the internet”, because of privatized ISPs. people can’t afford to pay for internet, and because of that facebook has carved a very fine anti-competitive hole for themselves; because, even if you can’t afford to pay for internet, you can still browse facebook; as they pay the ISPs to allow people access to facebook for free despite not paying for an internet connection - meaning that people literally use facebook as the internet, finding businesses and tech support, information, share, communicating, hobby communities, calling, chatting, shopping, news, everything and anything. how do you compete with that? you can’t, not unless the fediverse somehow had the funds to pay these ISPs free access to the fediverse. and this sadly also means that as long as facebook maintains this massive userbase, facebook is here to stay.

Matrix is another “almost there, but not really”. It’s a fantastic platform, and it has gotten so very far since its inception, but it has too many bugs for public adoption (users except their platform of choice to ‘just work’), and still lacks essential features necessary to compete with Discord/Slack such as hotjoin voice chat, “servers” with “channels” (i know it tried to solve this, but their solution to it sucks), large-scale video conference (they sort-of do this, i guess - but it’s far from where it needs to be), and enterprise tools for administration, communication and organizing utility.

Bottom line, if the fediverse wants to succeed, it needs to focus on the tools necessary for communities to maintain a coherent environment. To focus on tools allowing creators to spread their creations. To focus on tools allowing business operations to spread their crap. To focus on tools allowing users to maintain a structured community of interest. And to some how afford to be free without an internet subscription.