Is lemmy supposed to be a reddit replacement? What is the user count vs reddit? Is it worth it sticking around? I usually just casually scroll and read interesting random things, to which I may or may not get involved in, however, here my home page is empty and I probably have to subscribe to pages in order to see anything there.
You can just browse all or browse all of your instance (the Portuguese lemmy?).
The pro vs reddit is that it’s federated. This means that every lemmy instance can have its own rules, communities and members, but they can interact with other lemmy instances (for example, I’m from lemmy.world) as long as the home instance allows connecting to that lemmy instance.
It works similarly to reddit, but there is no one company controlling it all. You could start your own instance today and federate with any instance you like. The user count is a lot lower, as you might expect, but you’ll still get a decent amount of content through actual users, but also a lot of bots posting news to specific communities.
I use Boost for Lemmy, it used to be a reddit client. It also gives you the option to block or mute users, communities or entire instances. For me, this means I can subscribe to stuff I’m really interested in but just use all for scrolling through the lemmyverse.