I think the issues with lemmy are overstated. Lemmy is still new and going through growing pains as the community explodes and servers are pushed, but overall in terms of usability, connectability, and such you can use Lemmy today and get your community link aggregate fix.

Mastodon does have a lot of issues with connecting and being clunky, but I think even the .17 release of lemmy already had that figured out better. Following people on mastodon can involve having to open up a new tab and copying and pasting information from a different instance into your own and even then the old posts from that person will not show up. You may or may not be able to find posts even if theyre in an instance that federates with your own.

Perhaps because Lemmy deals in communities and not individuals this is a pretty moot subject. If you are subscribing to an obscure instance then you might need to do the ol’ copy and past over, but otherwsie I can mostly just go to communities up top on lemmy, type “star trek” and get into a star trek instance. I can also view old posts from that instance and(bugs aside) things should update for me in real time.

Lemmy is already fairly user friendly compared to mastodon.