Some of the local subs I read have presences on Lemmy but no content. Most normies are still using Reddit.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy still doesn’t have a lot of the communities I know and love on Reddit.

Never used Twitter.

There won’t be.

Just go back to the Internet forums of old - many major forums back in the day were ran as small businesses with subscriptions and advertising. I hope the fediverse does allow a commercial model - we need diversity in how to fund such infrastructure. If some instance owners want to institute subscriptions or include advertising on their instances, that should be a feature that the Lemmy developers should seriously consider. Otherwise, it’s hard to scale a service like this on donations alone.