I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn’t use the fediverse standard

This goes so hard I love it

Precisely! I try to comment and post partly for the purpose of generating activity

Reddit didn’t always have that, and Lemmy I think is in many ways meant to resemble Reddit before the introduction of user-focused features. Kbin has the option though.