Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
I think one of Lemmy’s issues is that everyone wants to create a community instead of contributing to what’s here. People expect to have all the “niche hobby” communities like Reddit had right off the bat, but we don’t have the mass of people to support that - especially when you can have multiple communities for one topic across instances. Everything dilutes to nothing.
So we end up with nearly a 1:1 user/community ratio and every community either gets abandoned or only has 1 power-user posting.
I think the solution is essentially what you’re doing - to take existing communities and breathe life into them. Start out small and focused, and then branch out when it feels necessary.