Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.

That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”

I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around “going dark” for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them “let’s focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative.” Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.