It’ll develop. Whether it should or not eventually Lemmy will develop its own distinct online culture which carries across instances, topics and communities.

I know people will think it won’t have its own particular culture because it’s decentralized etc etc but I remember people saying the same thing about Reddit in like 2011. The smaller community identities either got absorbed into the larger idea of what a “redditor” is or the subs just died.

It’s a little early to say, but Lemmy culture so far has a lot of carryover of Reddit. Which makes sense considering most people here probably used Reddit first. In my experience Lemmy yo-yos between reddit but grumpier and reddit but more conversational. It reminds me a lot of early reddit in that people put more effort into their comments than other places, but also has an air of confident pseudo-intellectualism. There’s no real hivemind yet but there are generally popularized norms.