> and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.

Unless it is a reddit sub, where a mod has shut it down (and the community hasn't moved to another tangent reddit sub), I'm just not seeing a reduction in engagement on Reddit by the people who post.

The field of dreams approach for creating communities on Lemmy doesn't seem to be the most effective way at creating communities - especially if you, the person creating the /c/, aren't creating original content for it (long form posts) and actively working on discoverability of the /c/ (cross posting as appropriate).

Creating or gathering a community is a lot more work than just creating a /c/.

My claim is still that the people who left Reddit because of the latest mess were (a) not content creators themselves, or (b) looking for a reason to leave.

For group (a), this resulted in some subs getting made private and the communities on reddit readjusted to tangent ones.

For group (b), while a loss was not a significant one. On a casual sub that I moderate (and thus have access to stats for), I only see the number of unique users grow since January (the official iOS client use is 3x larger than Android, and 10x larger any of the other sources). The number of monthly active unique users for a middling activity cat sub is 36,000 (compare all of Lemmy at 69,000 monthly active users). I haven't seen any indication of a reduction in the posting of the 1% of content creators on Reddit in any of the subs that I moderate, nor anecdotally, any of the subs that I visit.