I think this is getting downvoted a little unfairly. I suspect this is mostly because the title went a bit too far in the “provocative” direction. If you were to build on this, I’d say extract the parts about setting up your own instance (everything after “In Comes Lemmy”) and expand that.

A couple other thoughts:

• I agree that !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org is awesome, if you contact pmjv he’ll probably respond
• You say: “When you use Lemmy, you have to subscribe to specific communities in order to see the content from those communities.” which is not literally true – you can just set your account to read “all”, and a lot of people do that. Not sure what the default is, especially if you set up your own instance.

ikr. I never thought of reddit as hipsters.

Some Lemmy phone apps have ads.

go for it, fam! Yeah, I think it’s a lot more fun to be posting when someone else is already posting there. (instead of just posting by yourself.)

The big three are:

• memes
• politics/news
• tech

There are a couple dozen people who keep a smaller community alive (like PugJesus on history, anon6789 on owls, JohnnyEnzyme on euro graphic novels, LaurenceWolse on b movies, Nexius Lobster on traditional art, etc); occasionally someone takes over a community and starts posting regularly, and occasionally someone burns out and the community dies.