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 mean, if you’re browsing all you can’t be surprised there’s a lot of crap you don’t care about. That’s what the subscribed feed is for.
All is practically useless when most instances uses that auto subscribe to every community on every instance bot. Just on my test community on my own instance which is there only for testing bugs and other crap, there’s 73 subscribers and 72 of them are those auto subscribe to everything bots. Now I run some tests on that community and I get downvotes and even spam reports on them, from people seeing it on All.
So, no wonder All is crap. It includes all the spammy meme communities and even test communities nobody in their right mind would even think subscribing to. The small communities you talk about are probably still there, just drowned in All. Subscribe to them, default to subscribed feed and you’ll be good to go.