I get the preference to be able to block communities and instances easier, but to me it’s against the whole censorship resistance that Lemmy is about. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/05-censorship-resistance.html

This is a community site that tries to cater to everyone and everything. That’s why there are the options to only view the local instance, subscribed communities, and all is for everything. The price of censorship resistance is that it takes extra time to subscribe to communities of interest and to block things that are not of interest, and things are still more cluttered than they need to be. I get the desire to get through that filtering process faster and easier, but Lemmy and the other Federated services are still in Beta, are running on volunteers and shoestring budgets, and are dealing with with some other major issues. I think that over time the things people are asking for will get implemented, but it will take longer than on other corporate entities. You may want to transition to a smaller instance from Lemmy.World that fits your interests better and doesn’t have as much of the content that you dislike. Also, try be patient, continue to subscribe and filter to your likes and dislikes, and if it’s not there, maybe take some time away from Lemmy and check back again in a few months.

It’s just a different way to browse current topics that people are discussing. You can follow famous/not famous people, news people, musicians, artists, scientists and so on. You have to take some time to search by name or a hashtag like #music that is interesting for you and then follow those. They typically lead to more people and hashtags of interest that you can follow to build a more personal feed. It’s just a different way to curate the various things that interest you.

The thing is that it’s just another option for people to interact like lemmy/reddit twitter/mastodon pixelfed/facebook etc. Obviously the less popular options have less niche interests. Journalists see that these options can’t be used the same way, and need some work to figure out and navigate, so they critique the different and less polished things they see. If they don’t have what you are looking for, maybe check back in 3-6 months when there are more users and activities. Like lemmy, things are changing quickly right now.

It feels like 20 years ago migrating from large chatrooms to bulletin board forums with a smaller more specialized community like setup. Posts and threads don’t instantly get buried, and there don’t seem to be as many assholes looking to pick a fight.

I see that by scaling down, some of the the more niche forums don’t get the traffic, but that will likely change over time. I’m digging the integration with Mastodon so links to people and articles don’t have to flow through Twitter. It minimizes having to sift through tons of ads to read what I want.

I also like the region based instances like lemmy.ca and midwest.social having communities and news that is of interest to those regions. It would be cool once more countries have their instances / communities.

Reddit had a good idea with having subs, but many of them got too big to be able to have meaningful discussion for many people. What is the point of trying to comment and engage in a topic that has 5000 posts? Lemmy hopefully can solve that by having the same community in different instances to keep the size where more people can discuss topics in a smaller more engaging setting.