I don't know, I was there in the beginning. I think it died because it had no real content, compared to reddit. And, all anyone talked about was reddit, or reposted stuff from reddit, just like we're seeing here. I think this might stick a bit better because reddit is way bigger than it was back then, so even if the same super small % of users came over, it would still be quite a bit more content.
For comparison of how negligible all the Lemmy fediverse is, there are ~40k active users this month. Reddit has over 50 million active users. So, that's around 0.1% of reddit users. Literally 99.9% of reddit are not here.
I think it's probably doomed. It'll never overtake reddit. But, it'll be a nice, quiet, alternative.
edit: Here's a quick litmus test for all the downvoters (I guess "correct" answers only here!). How many times have you gone to reddit today?
edit: I was part of this attempted migration, not the hate one. This isn't the first blackout for reddit being shitty.
edit: I humbly apologize for my opinion. The downvotes have made me realize I was wrong. My reeducated opinion is that Lemmy will overtake Meta, Mastadon, Twitter, and Google (wtf is reddit?), and every upvote will be worth $1000, making everyone rich! Or, we can have fun speculating, and wait and see how things go. I hope they go well!
Ok, now let's ask the 99.9% of Redditors that aren't here. You take the left 25,000,000, I'll take the right, meet back in 5. Go!
edit: Oh man, I'm out of breath. We might need help. How about every single lemmy user helps us! That's only about 1,300 people we each have to ask! Well, 1,299 for me. At 4 seconds each, that's should only be about 1.5 hours. See you all soon!