1. the post already said why:

I would love to move away from reddit but it's hard when this is where the base of my favorite communities still exists.

2. further compounded by issues such as (a) overall lack of moderation, which further depends on (b) better development of moderation tools, and (c) guides explaining how things work, bc it can be fairly confusing, e.g.:

How do I find selfhosted communities on Lemmy? If I search for "selfhosted" I get one community (Run It Yourself) with around 3K subscribers and very little activity. Is that it?

Though someone answered (I think incorrectly):

I think the biggest one is 40k on lemmy.world and it's called "selfhosted". You must be on a Lemmy server that doesn't show that community for some reason. There are ideological rifts on Lemmy that can cause some servers to splinter like that.

Interestingly, from my old instance discuss online, I see no hits at all to that term among community names - https://discuss.online/search?q=selfhosted&type=Communities&listingType=Local - meaning that nobody from that instance has subscribed to it yet.

Which is why things like Categories of Communities (already fully functional on PieFed) are so helpful to guide people to what they may be looking for.

3. And I haven't even begun on the whole tankies connotation of moving here.

I think it's clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit.

No - apparently not, it's only clear to you, not them, for all the reasons listed above and likely more besides. We would have to build it first, before they will come... and even then I would expect a long delay. In the meantime, Lemmy MAUs (Monthly Active Users) are actively declining, whether they are returning their traffic to Reddit or not.

Us vs them too. It's different, people hate change. So now there is a them and an us..

For the same reason Youtube is doing with Odysee and Peertube - money - walled garden.

We aren't Russian bots?

Anyone still left on Reddit is either too ignorant about the alternatives to Reddit to even have an opinion or is actively trying to keep people on Reddit for Reddit.

I can conjecture some things, though I can't be 100% sure on either:

First, maybe it's fanatics/fanboys that don't like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it's paid actors complaining. Third, it's robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.

I was just thinking about this because I've been going through and blocking every political community. I've found that when that is gone, there's really not that much left aside from random technology focused stuff, some memes, asinine twitter screenshots, and a fuck ton of linux stuff. And the comments sections of seemingly unrelated posts often devolve into political shit slinging. I'm on an instance that blocks lemmygrad and hexbear so I can imagine it's far worse for the ones that don't. I'm starting to sour on lemmy too because there's basically nothing here of interest to me anymore.

The biggest point is tankies and the toxic "left" people here and that Lemmy has some major problems regarding stability and the ability to effectively moderate.

Another point is that Lemmy has in may places worse moderation than reddit.

Grumpy young boomers

Get off my internet!