I still do not understand how this guy is given so much power. Seriously, what the fuck? How does he keep winning? How does everyone keep bending the knee? How are there so few people telling him to go fuck himself? Is he scary in real life?

This is a really good question, and I suppose the answer is the same as to why Mastodon is not more popular.

I think it is a combination of several factors:

1. Not many people know about it. Really, reddit is one of the most well known websites on the internet. Very few people know lemmy/mastodon.
2. UI/UX issues. The more friction there is, the smaller the probability of someone using something. And Lemmy has TONS of friction. And the lemmy devs are not welcome to suggestions. Seriously, every suggestion that is made is probably answered with “I am against this”. If the idea did not come from their heads, they are probably against it. This has been my experience with them, at least.
3. Lack of content. On reddit, there is tons of content. On lemmy, not so much. And people are generally not very principled. They want to consume, and completely ignore the ethics/morality of whatever it is they are doing.

I think this is not necessarily bad though. Lemmy DOES need more content and more users. But I hope it never becomes the size of reddit. Because reddit fucking sucks. People are stupid as fuck there now. The amount of low effort and low information content on reddit is astonishing.

Hopefully, Lemmy gets the smart, principled, interesting people and reddit keeps the influencers and onlyfaners.

I find tuta.com much better than proton. I always found proton unnecessarily expensive.