Is lemmy supposed to be a reddit replacement?
It is a forum Website. The same way every shooter game is not a doom clone and every car is not a Ford clone.
What is the user count vs reddit?
relevancy. As long as you find people to talk with, that is irrelevant.
Is it worth it sticking around?
You decide.
however, here my home page is empty and I probably have to subscribe to pages in order to see anything there.
I would count it as a positive, that Lemmy is not shoving me posts up my ass that I may or may not even want to see, just so I create more content/Data for advertisers. If I want to eat, I go to a community and eat the things I want. I don't want to be force fed like a pig.
Or even if I want non personalized stuff, I just go to the all tab.
Also, since he can't launch it in most countries due to privacy regulations, this whole project is now nothing more than a few places in India where homeless people line up to get $5 for a scan of their eye.