While not every community is on Lemmy yet that I visit on Reddit, by people migrating from Reddit to here, hopefully that issue will be solved soon. The community here seems way more welcoming than the Reddit community is too
Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.
I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.
Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.
Join us at /c/memes! The thing with Lemmy is that it is still very young. So if you see a community not getting enough attention, post there yourself. When you and I start posting, and people start seeing more content, they will start posting as well.
Interest is waning because there is no work being done on federation. Federation is the defining feature of this project, and no tangible progress has been made.
There was massive interest in the project when it first picked up some steam and for a while after. I think that most people are viewing it as a dead project. There are multiple FOSS link aggregator servers out there, and while Lemmy is i believe technically superior to them all, the interest is in federation, not another alternative link aggregator. I personally think that all feature requests need to be put on the backburner until there is at least minimal federated functionality. Of course I am not the maintainer or project manager so that is not up to me, it is just my opinion.
Also bear in mind, this instance is not for production, it is for testing. So that will play a role in people being skittish of signing up here.
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