Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don’t care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don’t care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
The simple reality is that it is not possible to maintain good relations with the US. Donald Trump is an idiot and a fascist whose agenda is driven by his whims as much as anything else. Starmer could bend over backwards to appease His Orange Majesty on every issue and Trump would still fuck the UK just because.