I agree, the content is just not here at the moment and I want to back to Reddit. I'm holding strong for the moment but we'll see where it leads.

Upvoted for unpopularity.

May I suggest you try other instances?

Beehaw.org has a totally different vibe (and de-federated with lemmy.world atm). Go check them out. There's no prominent shitposting community there. The number of communities are limited and the opinions toward Meta may be similar but it's specifically geared toward relaxed conversation.

Mander.xyz for scientific communities, lemmy.ca for Canadian, aussie.zone for 'strayan, find a local or purpose built instance that will have a crowd more suitable for yourself. Even if it means giving up some of the Redditness of Lemmy.world (which seems to me the currently closest in vibe with Reddit, both positively and negatively).

Especially on smaller instances, help build that community you want to see.

I think your assessment is spot on. I find a lot of such individuals, if not worse, in various posts. While I encourage redditors to migrate here, when they get here and see shit like what you describe, it's no surprise if they go back.

I'm missing some of the subreddits I used to frequent.

It is understandable but also lemmy is so new you can't expect the number of community and user as reddit

I deleted my Account as soon as I learnt that Apollo would no longer work. I did continue to lurk on some subs until they wall went NSFW and I couldn't access them in a browser any more, but I was getting more into Lemmy and Mastodon, so I didn't really mind.

There is still one subreddit that I do miss; I had noticed some Astroturfing from commercial interests in the months leading upto the API price change, but I had just blocked those users and moved onto real user content.

I try to access it every few days to lurk, but it is always inaccessible without logging in.

I did manage to get into it this morning for a few minutes (Mods must have been doing some spring cleaning) and noticed that the content that I previously enjoyed was no longer being published. It was full of Astroturf, Ads and an occasional uninteresting post.

Just go ahead and block them if you want. I block a lot of the accounts that repost news articles that talk about Reddit’s latest shenanigans. I don’t care, I deleted my reddit account, our relationship is over.

I think and I'm really sorry to say you are confused, and have little clue of what you are talking about.
Your question should be: why are you here in the first place? not why you shouldn't. Trying to find reddit's good twin brother? Wrong place.

look this up: "ba miao zhu zhang"

And in italian we say: "la gatta frettolosa fece i figli ciechi" / the hasty cat makes blind kittens

Im thinking there will be another wave of users when the major 3rd party apps are ready. In the meantime, I am frustrated in the fact like my 4 favorite niche apps have like ghost towns for communities. That includes one that has like 2.4 million followers on Reddit.

I mean if there are so many tech people here why isn't there more discussion for instance in an Android Apps community on Lemmy?

find the communities you like.

What you're experiencing I think is completely normal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Reddit is mainstream, and Lemmy is not. Hypothetically, you might find, say, your plumber on Reddit, who casually browses in down time. The most normal user probably just uses a browser or the normal app; they may have very little or no knowledge about the reddit blackouts, what's happening, and why.

Maybe some users were using third party apps and know what happened, but if they don't care much about the reasons they might just stop using Reddit or settle with the native app. This category of users and the last are all probably making up a large part of the user base in general, and of the non-tech (normal?) Subreddits in particular.

The users who migrated to Lemmy by this point will be pretty much a reversal of Reddit's dynamic. The majority will be privacy/tech minded and have moved specifically in protest to Reddit's corporate/capitalist practices. They are here hoping to disrupt the norm and prove that we don't require a centralized power system to run social media.

Then there are probably a minority of users who are simply curious because they heard about an alternative and wanted to see what this is all about. A lot of these users probably don't stick around if they don't see the kind of stuff they want to see.

Out of any groups, only a small portion will provide content, and a slightly larger portion will take part in discussion. Memes are the easiest content to produce and to consume, so that's probably why they're so prevalent.

Personally I enjoy the conversation around privacy, FOSS, etc, but I do truly hope we'll start to see more of the normal communities develop here. Particularly I miss some of the creative writing communities which I know for sure haven't really transferred off of Reddit by this point.

Yeah, I missed Digg when I switched to Reddit back in 2011. It took a few years before I got comfortable there. I assume the same will happen here on Lemmy.