I personally see the small userbase of lemmy as an advantage as well. Reddit is too popular now, it’s full of karma-farming bots and commercialized, mass-appealing content. Those things are worthwhile on sites with millions of users, but not here. We just need enough active users to get things going. The app devs of Reddit clients might be of great help.
I generally like awards, but on Reddit I’ve completely ignored them on posts. It was just too many of them.
I liked the awards for comments though, as they helped pick out comments from the bottomless pit. Not really a problem on Lemmy yet…