I completely agree.

Reddit is worse because of its size, resulting in problems with spam/low effort posts and comments.

This smaller size is a bit of a double-edged sword though. If I want to discuss cooking/chef knives with people, for example, there isn't a niche community specifically for that topic. Maybe in this way it's best for people to head outside of Lemmy to other forums for more specific interests, and Lemmy can be more tech/general discussion oriented.

I haven't quite figured that out yet.

if you took the world and seperated its humans by intelligence, the “idiot” group is going to be much bigger than the “PhD” group. Like…by a lot.

No.... you'd have a bell curve. But even that assumes you have a single good measure of intelligence.

I kind of agree with the rest of your post, but I would have worded it a bit differently, emphasizing that people who found it difficult to start using Lemmy might still be worth having around. Also, I don't think "as large as Reddit" or "small niche unknown" are our only options.

Oh that sucks. Tbf the entire concept of the Fediverse is an enormous security nightmare regardless: someone was telling me how a person could spin up an instance and share a picture also served up from their machine, then maliciously correlate the incoming IP addresses from the latter of people who viewed it vs. make interactions (voting or comments) in the former to identify you irl. But at least that takes some technical effort, and there seems no reason not to put additional obstacles up to make it harder.

Unfortunately the Lemmy developers seem to have little incentive to add features that are primarily for Westerners who e.g. don't agree that an authoritian admin and/or mod is always correct regardless of the facts. And Westerners don't seem in that much of a hurry to make alternatives - although K/MBin exists already and Sublinks is coming as well. If we want better, we would need to put in the work to make it happen.

It's still a thousand times better than Reddit:-). Except I no longer recommend Lemmy to people that I meet irl - I can't keep doing that in good conscience anymore, until there is an instance that defederates Lemmy.ml. Yes the new person could block many people and even whole instances, but it seems a little similar to recommending that someone use Arch Linux - like, really!? Hopefully the concept of the Fediverse will improve someday soon and I can do that once more, bc I really do want to.