Yeah Reddit really made the cost just impossible for any slightly active app unable to continue without any form of meaningful profit. I would have loved to support whatever Third Party app but yeah wouldn’t have been enough to keep them afloat.
For Lemmy not being perfect, it feels like it’s just more of a number of users issue vs an actual technical problem. Sure fediverse stuff can be complicated, but after signing up and searching communities you can pretty much do some normal Reddit feeling stuff IMO. I’m trying to revive the Twitch Lemmy community if anyone wants to help with that (I have no clue what to do)!
Edit: also adding that I didn’t think about moderation or tools that Lemmy may or may not have in place since I’ve never been a mod for any of that. So maybe a technical problem somewhere.