Not enough niche communities

Not even just niche communities, either. There are interests with possibly hundreds of millions of English speakers that don't have good representation on Lemmy (or piefed or Mbin). There's no critical mass of discussion about sports, much less for specific sports, specific leagues, or specific teams. Same issue with food and cooking, a handful of posts on a handful of communities, but very few discussions. Television and film have seen an uptick in activity (I'm subscribed to television@piefed.social and that's been getting better), but it's still not quite at where reddit was in even 2010 or so.

Local city subreddits are still a valuable source of information and discussion around what's happening in any particular place, and I haven't seen anything like that on lemmy.

I don't expect Lemmy to have the same level of discussion around smaller niches, but I hope we can soon hit the point where more mainstream topics can get actual discussion. Lemmy has plenty of great discussion around lots of topics, especially around technology, but it's still got a long way to go.