It is old enough to have niche communities but they are very rare. It is still dominated by memes, politics and the bad side of tech

Eh. It only feels dead if you let it.

Tech communities make sense. That's where a lot of it started on other sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit) and the first user-base I'd expect to move. The rest will likely stay where they're "comfortable" until the water gets too hot

I think it's in a great position and only needs more instances that respect freedom of speech.

Probably my biggest complaint is users saying there should be more censorship. You have the block button, use it.

oooh another how is lemmy doing post

meh it's ok, look at the graphs the numbers are massively down but making a very slow recovery maybe

so there's about 40k active users, so it's quiet

Sad.

Feels dead.

Just like my will to live...

Might pick up ham radios as a hobby if I wasn't so scared and introverted to talk to old white dudes in America... yea that'd feel weird... most ham radio people are right wing libertarians... not my cup of tea... also not white... which might be weird when they start asking what my favorite sports team is or what my favorite music is... not American enough to answer those questions lmfao...

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.

Imagine social media as an upsidedown parabola (like an arc), where the x axis is time, and the y axis is quality.

The start of a new social media platform would be towards the bottom left. As they grow and add new features, their quality improves. Over time, however, they will 'peak' in quality. Then, they begin to introduce anti-consumer practices, such as API restrictions, ads, sponsored posts, etc. Their quality dwindles until either the platform shuts down or becomes a horrible echo chamber.

Using this analogy, Reddit right now would be in the latter half of the graph, as it has become an echo chamber filled with bots, ads, and API restrictions.

Lemmy currently is more like approaching the peak for the parabola. It's great for now.

Sure Lemmy is open-source, self-hostable, but it's potential downfall would be its userbase. It's starting to have the same issues as Reddit: Don't comply with every else's opinions, get downvoted to oblivion. Of course, downvotes don't mean much on here, but getting banned would.

In its own way, Lemmy is starting to become an echo chamber for tech/Linux enthusiasts, radicals, and those exiled from Reddit.

I have only encountered number 3 but I don't really use this or any social media as a news source. For me its like hanging at a bar and maybe someone has something interesting and maybe then I might look into it.

Unsubscribe from every community and build your feed again

Yes, that's why I joined PieFed instead.