It appears API rate limiting has effectively killed these alternatives. You essentially get nothing but “Too many requests” 429 errors.
Lemmy sadly does not have the active niche news and discussions I want. But now nothing can be read without going to Reddit. I hate Spez
I think the idea of having crossposted content is ok since you can opt in or out of seeing it, just looked through the instance though and it seems like nobody is interacting with the content at all. For me, my favorite part of the posts on Reddit was reading through the conversations in the comments. Imo, if nobody is interacting with the content that is being crossposted we shouldn’t bother with continuing to copy it over