We'd love to be able to start a proper open-source programming collective, with the ability to hire more programmers than just the two of us to add features and make lemmy better, but the money just isn't there. Its difficult to compete with a multi-billion dollar company that's able to pay high salaries and mobilize hundreds of skilled programmers ( even tho I still am veryy proud of what we've been able to do with our limited time, and all the contributions people have made to lemmy ).

Its not a specific problem for us either, all open source projects need more funding than theyre currently getting to thrive. Twitch streamers make more money than open source devs, its a pretty sad state of affairs.

IMO pretty much the only reason reddit is beating us, is the first-mover advantage. I noticed a long time ago that adding more features doesn't improve the lemmyverse's user count. Its only when reddit alienates certain groups, that we see large influxes of users and new instances. Otherwise people are happy to stay on reddit, because that's where communities already are.

/r/piracy is probably the next big community that could migrate to lemmy. Reddit keeps banning then unbanning piracy-related communities, and file-sharers will see that their position is precarious there. /r/privacy should move to lemmy, the reddit redesign is a bloated mess of spyware.