I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
A lot of Reddit “sub-equivalents” are lemmy.world, I do find them humorous, even if it’s sometimes in a “haha the world is fucked up” kind of way.
If you recognize that it’s unhealthy for you, it’s likely a good idea to block those communities for yourself.
Many on Reddit simply have a subscribed list to their favourite subreddits and completely ignore the popular/all page. You can do the same by Subscribing to a bunch of communities here then limiting your feed to that, especially if you want to see things other than the memes and shitpost communities.