It's on the radar, but it will probably never have the critical mass that reddit has; can its servers handle and afford millions of users and billions of requests a month?

Currently it surely cannot handle the scale of Reddit. They do „tens of thousands“ now and will have to discover the bottlenecks for „hundreds of thousands“ first.

Anyways, maybe this gives Lemmy a boost towards the next level.

Little addition: The Lemmy-verse does notice increased activity. https://beehaw.org/post/468998

If you want to join, probably better use one of the smaller instances.