It is interesting how people get different results. My process has been to simply block a user or instance when it’s obvious nothing from there will ever be interesting to me. I haven’t had to do that a lot though, and I don’t see any of what you suggest. Then again, while I see mostly Lemmy content, I use Mbin, so perhaps that’s part of it as well. Some instances might preblock better than others.

I do think the learning curve is higher than traditional social media. Not that it’s hard, but the average person wants a plug and play without having to do anything. The caveat of having a preset curation of “safe” feed is that most people don’t explore past that, and it’s the random stuff that wanders in that makes things more interesting.

I only use Subscribed and sometimes Local on topic-specific instances. Do I run out of new stuff to see? Sure. But that is fine, there are other things to do with my time than scroll on social media. (Content discovery through !newcommunities@lemmy.world or just hopping around on the community list of an instance. But frankly, it is internet funtime, not meaningful inform myself time, so even if I only stuck to my few communities and buried my head in the sand—which to be honest is the majority of my strategy to avoid drowning in politics and angry/depressing memes that inevitably circle back to politics—it would be just fine.)