I’ve been using Lemmy for a couple years now, and unfortunately I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active. When I first joined I saw much more variety when browsing the All feed. But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
I think this shift has changed the culture of Lemmy. There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with. The discussions don’t feel as nuanced. Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
The niche communities that made Lemmy special are fading away, and the resulting monoculture makes me less inclined to participate. I want a platform that supports substantive discussions in my interests, not just memes and shitposting.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level, but a culture shift is needed if Lemmy wants to retain users like me who valued the diversity of opinions. I may have to move to a platform that allows better filtering and proportionality between niche interests and funny or stupid content. I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active. I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
I never found “all” browsable for any platform whether it be lemmy, YouTube, or reddit. It’s why subscribing has been so important to me, and filtering. Like on YouTube which I access through freetube I’ve disabled “trending” and “popular” since even the thumbnails were obnoxious for majority of the videos, and I blocked out channels to keep them from dominating search results. And on reddit what even made /r/all viewable was a reddit enhancement suite filter lists that was in the hundreds for blocking of communities, and even then was a wack a mole that required keyword filtering.
All of any platform will devolve into a shit show. As for niche subs. Yeah, not much that can be done about that if the user base is small.
I just tried using all, wow, I didn’t realize the fediverse had declined this much. It’s worse than a 250k member Facebook meme group that’s been abandoned.
I’ve had to block off entire instances too which I use the Connect app for.