I come on here every so often to see what’s going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
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This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
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The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I’m seeing more and more gross content that’s either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn’t get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit’s moderation is, it’s still not this bad.
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Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation… and nobody cares? People don’t criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I’ve seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what’s even happening?
I don’t know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that’s not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?


There’s so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another’s experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you’re subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.
You’ll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there’s also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.
You’ll only think its full of hate if you’re not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.
And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn’t excuse it a as behaviour but I don’t think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.
The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn’t have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.