Is lemmy supposed to be a reddit replacement? What is the user count vs reddit? Is it worth it sticking around? I usually just casually scroll and read interesting random things, to which I may or may not get involved in, however, here my home page is empty and I probably have to subscribe to pages in order to see anything there.
It’s similar to Reddit, but one of the defining features is that it’s not owned by a company, or by anyone at all. Anyone can stand up a Lemmy instance and participate as a part of the distributed system. All the instances can interact (federate) with all of the others, or choose not to with specific instances.
Currently there is only a fraction of the user base on Lemmy as on Reddit, so there’s less content. There are also a lot fewer bots and trolls, so conversations tend to be more civil.
Because getting started on Lemmy is slightly more complicated than Reddit, more of the user base tends to be technically inclined, and they tend to be more liberal, so you’ll find Lemmy is more left leaning generally.
I believe the browsing style defaults to “local,” which means only content on your local instance. Change that to “all” and you’ll see more. The other selector let’s you see different sorting views - if you’re new you might start with “top week” or similar to see what has they most upvotes over they last seven days.
Welcome!