[defrost]

> The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it all in terms of getting mass adoption.

It's a community by community thing.

Eg: Astro-nerds have places such as universeodon.com with 10K active users (more science journo's and tangential-astro than hard core gravitional physicists) which is one sub reddit equivalent.

With similar Fediverse clumps for various types of math, cyber security, alternative OS hacking, etc. things are happening.

Mass adoption might be missing .. but that can be a good thing, the charm of old reddit a decade+ ago was small groups of high quality.