Boomer, here. The fediverse is the first thing I’ve seen that has the potential to replace the old USENET (also a federated system). Unfortunately, Lemmy has similar weaknesses/vulnerabilities to USENET which was destroyed by SPAM, high resource (compute, bandwidth, admin time…), and an influx of newbs (AoL).
Like reddit, Lemmy discourages long lived threads, which is unfortunate. But the longer Lemmy remains the home of linux geeks, the better, IMHO. I don’t have a burning need to see the newest pop culture memes.