I don’t like “big” instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.

After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.

So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn’t be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.

Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.

Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.

For example:

I’m not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.

This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don’t know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.

Sometimes I question the fact that some communities might be too niche, but even on something as generic as !movies@lemm.ee there aren’t that many people wanting to talk about movies