Lemmy is in growing pains. It doesn’t need to surpass Reddit, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that federation and defederation is like maintaining a garden, if your goal is high quality discussion amongst knowledgeable individuals. It’s like good moderation
Hexbear does a great job with this in my opinion, they are widely federated but are selectively defederated with instances like Lemmy.world (even though Lemmy.world defederated them before they were federated). Discussion on Hexbear is usually much higher quality per conversation (assuming it isn’t a meme post).
It’s a tradeoff if you want broad federation like Lemmy.ml or Lemm.ee.