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If anything I'm surprised by the constant Reddit comparisons, because this has never felt like Reddit to me.
It feels like a 90s forum. Small, focused on a handful of topics, you always argue with the same five guys about the same five things... It's not a Reddit replacement at all. Which is why I'm here, I don't contribute to Reddit and never have.
Admittedly I can't see why it's that surprising, the format is almost a carbon copy of Reddit.
When I think of old forums, I think of the chronological-only format with no voting. There is a top post in a thread, and all replies that follow are a single chain of chronological posts. No nested threads of parent/child comments that help keep conversations more organized, and no upvoting/downvoting which affect the sort criteria.
Not to mention older forums are usually directly admin-managed throughout, as in not just anyone is able to start a subforum/community on their own for a given interest within a site that they then moderate and can appoint their own co-moderators for. There's a site admin or admins, and maybe a group of admin-appointed moderators who help manage the entire thing.
I guess that's a fair point, but there are a few things I'd point out in response.
For one thing, nested threads weren't that rare, even early on. I refuse to give Reddit credit for that one. Pair that with the fact that around here the upvote sorting is far less relevant and you have a more forum-like arrangement. It's definitely not the "only the most upvoted post counts" thing over here. You have very long threads with a lot of different responses and responses to responses. The filtering and bubbling up based on popularity is not quite Reddit-like.
For another thing, and perhaps more importantly, social media isn't just defined by its features. Reddit is the way it is because of how people engage with it and how large and anonymous it is. The entry points are different, the connections are different, the reliance on discoverability tools is waaay different. This place doesn't feel like Reddit because even if it has a few of those tools it doesn't much need them. You can parse the entire firehose. You can't be Reddit like that.
Is this place really that small?
It is between 0.1 and 0.05% the size of Reddit.
So yes.
very small, lemmy has about less than 100k users, reddit has 100million+accounts, well you can consider half of people posting or commenting is mostly bots. also new accounts are generated in large numbers by spammers of link farmers, or people who have side businesses.