Lemmy is not supposed to replace reddit. Lemmy is it's own thing that has already existed for years now. The benefit of Lemmy over individual forums is the interconnectivity of separate communities and being able to view content from multiple communities in one single feed. You can subscribe to communities and view all your subscribed community posts in one feed. Theres also the All sort on the main page, which essentially functions as Lemmy front page. Its also, as you said, not centrally controlled. So if one part fails the rest can continue as normal. That makes it pretty robust. But it isn't meant to replace reddit, a massive social media platform with millions of users.

How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.

Why would "central management" be necessary for communities to grow? Email doesn't have any central management, and yet people are quite capable of building mailing-lists and other services on top of email. While mailing-lists may be "old-school" they still work pretty darn well; I'm on lists for my college alumni, for various interest groups, etc. that all get active discussions.

"How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want."

No one has ever said the Fediverse will be as easily accessible as Reddit, I think it's pretty much impossible because of the lack of centralization. But in my opinion, this just doesn't matter. The only solution would be, as you said, would be some form of central management. It is impossible to have a platform which both fixes the issues Reddit has experienced indefinitely AND has central management. Any social platform which cedes some kind of control, or even just legitimacy, to a centralized source (regardless of how the implementation starts out), will eventually turn into another Reddit. (Assuming the growth is there).

From my point of view the only downside to how Lemmy operates vs. Reddit is the slight learning curve of understanding Federation. Once you understand the concept, your concerns about the platform "fizzling out" would be moot. If you understand Federation, how is it confusing that your different sports communities are in different instances? Each community is distinct in its values, rules, and moderators, they get to choose where to exist, and the alternative would be impossible without granting control to a single meta-instance.

"but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group."

I couldn't disagree more, and this is one of my main gripes with Mastodon. Over reliance on a flagship instance only serves to shoehorn people into Lemmy without actually understanding how the platform works. Take the top three English-speaking mastodon instances:

1. mastodon.social: 878k
2. mastodon.cloud: 229k
3. mastodon.online: 164k Source

mastodon.online was created by Mastodon as a secondary official instance, next to the original mastodon.social. When the Twitter influx happened, the vast majority of users signed up for mastodon.social because it was the "flagship instance". Not as many user's would have chosen mastodon.social if they actually understood how Federation worked, instead of just blindly signing up for the flagship instance.

Also, about communities about the same topic possible being fragmented across multiple instances is a pro of Lemmy, as long as we foster a culture of combining communities together who agree, while retaining the option to split off to another instance.

TLDR; Understanding how Federation works > Pandering to new users with a flagship instance

The same way IRC servers and forums grew back in the 2000s. Centralized services are something that only started showing up in the early 2010s.

I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:

The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.

It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.

All we can do is try to make the best of it.

I think with the influx from reddit, which gathers a lot of technical users (which I think are also among the first users to migrate), I can see lemmy getting a lot more contributors in the coming days/weeks.

Among the features I'd love to see happen, some would also address your concerns about the lack of centralization :

• Community federation : this would make it possible to "fuse" communities from different instances. The admin of a community would be able to add other communities as "subcommunities" and all posts from subcommunities would show up in the "main community's" feed. If the relationship is reciprocal, the two communities would "sync" with each other in some kind of way.
• "multicommunities" : users would be able to create and share lists of communities that span multiple instances
• Better community discovery across instances