Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
As someone who tried their damnedest to help make VOAT work and watched it die first from extremist trolls and then from inactivity… we don’t want EVERYONE we can get, but we do need a lot more than we have. We should have several 5000+ upvoted posts per hour, and we’re nowhere near that.