I understand how federation works, and Lemmy's UI seems more or less fine, but I guess I'm still not quite sold on federation in this style being the answer for Reddit-like functionality. It's a bit awkward, and unlike how Twitter's functionality is quite easily mimicked by Mastodon, I'm still kind of skeptical that following subreddit equivalents in that fashion maps quite as cleanly.

I'm not sure how I would do it differently, but I get the sense that there is a better way to have a decentralized Reddit-like experience, and probably one that avoids the risks of the current method (downtime, discoverability, scaling costs for the largest instances, etc).

I'll stick around the fediverse for now, but I really get the sense that it was built for a Twitter or maybe Tumblr like experience, and the Reddit-like experience will always feel a bit short of ideal.