I agree, the first mover advantage is huge. These are social sites, merely being a “better” product isn’t enough (but I do think it’s necessary).

I suppose an advantage for us of reddit’s position (that is, bound foremost by venture capital and profit, and therefore to reputation and popularity) is that we will inevitably see more entire communities alienated and cast out, and Lemmy is demonstrably already in a position to catch them, as we’ve seen with /r/GenZedong, /r/ChapoTrapHouse (hexbear) and /r/chodi (bakchodi). Like you said, /r/piracy is basically an inevitability, or even a gateway (if they said something like “If you want to share links, visit /c/piracy”). I wonder if it’s worth keeping a watch-list of places at risk, or places that might want to come for cultural reasons like /r/privacy or /r/foss (EDIT: I also wonder if the gateway strategy could be useful for political subreddits if there are boundaries they can’t cross due to site rules despite the subreddit moderators being fine with it)

In that case, it seems ironing out all the major usability bugs for newcomers is the best strategy rather than adding new features.