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.
Yeah, it’s basically an alternative to Reddit that federates. Since Reddit is centralized and closed source, they can push a lot of content on you immediately to get you started, which is a good thing. Lemmy, being decentralized and open source, would have a lot of push back if they tried to do that (which imho is bad, because it’s hostile to new users, but understandable, because there’s a sense of fairness that would be lost with that approach), so you start off with a blank slate, like you described. I recommend following some news and memes communities just to get started. You can also browser the All feed and follow some communities you see there.
One of my biggest gripes with Lemmy’s approach is that I’ll see the same things over and over when I refresh my feed.
Overall, I think Lemmy is good. Its upsides outweigh its downsides to me.