PieFed is highly promising, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to go overboard with criticizing Lemmy. Calling Lemmy a more authoritarian version of reddit… that’s a pretty wild take.
That’s like calling tribal societies more authoritarian than Stalinist or fascist states. There’s no such thing as low-level authoritarianism, that doesn’t make any sense. The users can message the mods directly, and they can go as they wish and do as they please. It’s like calling the nuclear family unit authoritarian, it becomes a nonsensical concept when applied to human-scale social organization. It refers to large scale social units such as nations and political parties, not small groups of freely associated individuals like Lemmy.
You’re still stuck in the reddit mindset where there isn’t anywhere else to go, everything is contained in one closed box controlled by spez. On Lemmy you can go and build your own box, and there are already dozens to choose from that are free and open to join.
You inspired me to do a bit more digging. I found the page on world population review.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/reddit-users-by-country
Which lists this site as the true source. Looks pretty legit to me. Seems to be a paid service.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
They’ve got US traffic listed around 51% for December 2024, so it’s actually gone up significantly compared to the March 2023 figures cited by world population review
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/reddit-traffic-report-march-2023pdf/257621808
Went from 2.32 billion US visits in March 23 to 3.17 billion in December 24, while Indian visitors actually declined significantly in the same period.