I don't get people that are here in the fediverse and want to bring over the content that is on FB, IG, TikTok, etc.

I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.

I'm in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won't ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that's what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.

I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I'm confident that they'll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the "dumbing down" of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.

Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. "Don't sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation" is a big one - but there's a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what's feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.

As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won't lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.

Same. Ideally, Lemmy would be a Reddit replacement for me.

I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people's attitudes. I suppose it's because it's such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.

Also, I don't think that the way to deal with "there is content on a platform that I don't like" is to run from it. It's to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:

• First, some people like different things. They shouldn't have to use different platforms just for that.

• Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.

I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.

Reddit didn't let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases -- like when it came to their own ads -- were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.

I thought I didn't until I came here and realized how nasty Reddit has become. You can go days on Lemmy without encountering an angry asshole.

It's appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it's popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!

Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...

Well... yes and no.

I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.

The mere existence of McDonalds dramatically hurt the options available.

I hear you! You and me both, I've always been more of a lurker on almost every social media. However here I feel more comfortable posting than anywhere else because I know people aren't here just to troll, gain followers through controversy or self-promote, so it feels way better.

You'll get comfortable soon enough

I appreciate your comment and points you made. Hope you keep at it too!