Can "Reddit" style websites ever work naturally again?

This is something I've noticed since people have started moving away from Reddit. The moment a clone or alternative is made it's a mad rush to claim a bunch of subreddits. So what you'd see is the first dozen or so users moderating/claiming many many subs leading to the same exact situation on Reddit. A few sites I've been to have tried remedying this by allowing mods to be impeached and it didn't work out too great. The reasoning is the users on that website just get upset if the moderator deletes practically anything. This leads to subs either being all or nothing.

A side issue I've noticed is a lot of alternate subs are also taken by the same mods, that redirect users to theirs (Example /t/Fruit redirects to /t/Fruits)

So how exactly do you think this format can be made to work again? The main things that need to be thought about is

1. Preventing the mad rush to claiming subs.

2. Allowing more options. If every alternative is just a redirect to the "main" sub it leaves users with no other option.