Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
I agree that the signing up process should be streamlined and bugs should be fixed. But I don’t agree we should maximize the userbase even if we need to weed out a lot of nasty people and bots later. That would make the platform more unpleasant instead of better.
I think the critical mass has already been reached. Not to be an exact copy of Reddit with all its tiny subs, but to be a nice place in its own right.
To combat the splintering problem I think there should be an option to combine similar communities of different instances. You would still have to choose an instance when posting, but when reading you wouldn’t.