I apologize for not answering for a long time. Spring, construction, constant moving.
It’s so hard for me to immediately write about strengths, I got a little distracted, but I can only give advice. This applies to those who create this platform, developers. Make it stand out from the competition. You know for yourself what the strengths and weaknesses are. Make it so that anyone who puts another script (and there are plenty of them on the net) knows that his version is not very good and there is a better one - Lemmy. People are such that they will prefer to use the best, especially since installation and support is not very complicated here. Just don't give anyone a chance. )
You can improve endlessly, any product can be made better and better, and you yourself know this.
I tried making my own search engine based on Nutch (sometime around 2000).
We created a directory of sites, with a strict selection, because. had experience in administering Dmoz, but these sites that were added to our catalog were indexed. Not deep, just 1 click from the main page.
But then we did not have enough capacity to carry out a good search.
Now I'm thinking about getting back to it. As part of one project that I am writing now (MIT license. Directory example: https://libarea.ru/web). We are experimenting, learning, facets for navigation, we will fasten the search later, there is still a lot of work.