Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn’t crash would be significant. If they don’t retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they’re doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.
I disagree. The obscure subs is what I really loved about reddit. Subreddits based on niche hobbies have a much wider userbase from reddit to pull from while you won’t have nearly as many people over here. Overall I’m looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow some more but I think lacking active discussion in some of the more niche communities will make it a little more boring for me than reddit was.