I think it still has potential but it needs more time to grow
There were lots of interesting online communities with great information and conversations before Reddit but they mostly died out as people moved on to other platforms. It’s a tale as old as time.
Lemmy’s just a platform and communities take a while to grow and there’s no guarantee they even will
At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.
They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren’t playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.