I dont need or want Lemmy to appeal to the mainstream. Frankly, I already get all the mainstream 'culture' I can stand, and frequntly more.
I think it's a mistake to consider Lemmy a one-to-one repacement for Reddit. I hope the fediverse can leverage the whole, y'know, federation thing. I think topic-driven instances that function similarly to the old phpBB boards is a good paradigm. It's not about a monster site that has a board for everything. It's more answering the question, 'What if I could post on gamefaqs from my metal archives account?'
I guess I just think we could do better than trying to out-reddit reddit, when it comes to having a vision for the platform.