Because reddit still has a huge userbase compared to Lemmy and that brings content, engagement and revenue, they are an institution of the internet at this point. Reddit posts are part of google results while Lemmy does not, when people have a problem they find old reddit threads for help, guides and tech support, not so with Lemmy. I would say 95% of reddit userbase doesn’t even know that Lemmy exists. One fuck up will not kill reddit as it currently is, they are too massive, one fuck up might kill Lemmy, if it just doesn’t slowly waste away. Reddit would have to fuck up constantly over a long period of time, kill communities, put features behind paywall, get caught in spying of the users, etc. And each time Lemmy would have to be advertizing itself in every twist and turn to get those users and not alienate them and be able to support the growing userbase and gain some benefit from them and them not just be a cost sink of lurkers.

Because Reddit gets an insane amount of use, whereas Lemmy doesn’t?

I like it here, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t still using Reddit. Most people don’t care about regressive policies, they just want to look at stupid memes and chat shit online.

Reddit cannot die unless their management does some insane thing that affects majority of user base. Killing 3rd party apps impacted a small minority so it was largely nothing. It is way too popular and useful to die at this point.

As for Lemmy, will be interesting to see how eventual operational cost problems will be resolved. Lemmy (Activity Pub?) is also pretty inefficient and does a lot of data duplication due to being decentralized. Centralized systems like Reddit are much more efficient.

Of you want to see an even more extreme example, look at how many people are still using Twitter despite all the shit getting pulled over there. Reddit’s shenanigans look tame by comparison.

For one thing, half the active users don’t want the platform to grow and retain more users. That’s not going to work. We need new users to keep the flow of content and discussions. People will inevitably leave, die, post and consume less and less as their lives change etc. If we don’t get new users we won’t be around long term.

The other problem though is that the lack of an algorithm turns off a lot of people who can’t find anything. Lemmy isn’t easily searchable, content is hard to find again if you don’t interact with it the first time you see it by commenting saving etc. the search function isn’t refined enough to allow you to find things quickly across instances or even just in one instance. Add to that that you don’t get a whole curated feed based on the things you do interact with, and the lack of one to one communities to equivalent subreddits and you’ve got a major problem.

Niche communities won’t show up here unless they have a community behind them and a community needs people.

Plus the toxic minority here is very loud just because there’s not that many users in comparison to literally most other mainstream social media.