I just don't understand what you mean by "good enough to replace Reddit." Reddit is a space for a community to grow, one that has shown itself to be toxic.

When you have a farm and find the soil to be toxic, you don't keep growing new crops on it, you start over in a fresh field with new seeds that grow into a new farm. Yes, your yield will be significantly smaller for a good long time at first, but that's just the effort required to keep a healthy farm.

That's what's "good enough to replace Reddit," and why Reddit itself isn't good enough anymore; it's not about the content the community makes, it's about the safety and the security of the space in which the community grows. The content is just the byproduct of that growth.

As for what you can do to help it grow, sure, most people can't run their own community - myself included. But if you have the time to comment on this post, you have time to comment on a post from a growing community with only a couple active users, and maybe make a post every so often.

That simple effort means now that community has a third active user, which paves the way for a fourth, and fifth, and so on. It's not hours worth of work, it's really just the same effort you've already shown in this one thread.

I don't have anywhere close to enough time to actually be the person who starts and moderates communities. If enough people start them and start participating in them then I'll start participating again, but "be the change" only works when people have free time to do it. I would love for Lemmy to take off, don't get me wrong, but all I was saying is that it hasn't yet and the claim people try to make here that it's already good enough to replace Reddit is pure cope.

But you do have enough time to assume that your personal opinion on a matter speaks about everyone's else. It doesn't.