Most people will probably disagree and say that I shouldn't be here if I don't like it, but yeah, like the title said. I switched over from Reddit for various reasons, and at first it was nice, but now it's making me depressed just casually browsing Lemmy. Everything here is so drab and negative, sometimes even downright hateful. Everything sucks, here's a list of companies you should never use, here's people that do horrible things, here's a bunch of complaints about stuff. This is why the world sucks, this is why your favourite thing is actually stupid, this is why you shouldn't enjoy xyz anymore.
At least half of the content on Lemmy is about American politics or how they affect the rest of the world, even on meme and shitpost subs you can't escape from the constant barrage of politically charged content. And when it's not American politics it's American lifestyle, like I get that america dominates the internet but I sincerely do not give a shit about your egg prices or your celebrities when I'm browsing memes to wind down.
And on top of that there's a distinct arrogance that permeates the fediverse, where people act like they're better than others for being conscious, and you're stupid for not boycotting 99 percent of brands and eating vegan and ditching cars and using european FOSS applications on refurbished Linux devices, etc.
Honestly I'm baffled when people ask stuff like "why don't more people join Lemmy?" Because I honestly would not recommend it to my friends. While it's nice in some ways, it is also so very exhausting, and for me personally, worse for my mental health than Reddit ever was.
Rant over and obligatory disclaimer: I did not mean to insult anyone, I don't have anything against the ideologies and lifestyles mentioned in my post, I simply wanted to share my personal opinions.
I get depressed sometimes too about Lemmy and the state of it. I love questions, for example. And I feel there aren't a lot of interesting or good questions being asked for people to answer. It's always about personal problem suggestions, some political baiting or whatever. And they'd go quiet for a while until more of those are posted again. AskReddit, while repetitious at times, had a lot of questions asked by the hour. Lemmy doesn't have that.
On paper, Lemmy has a lot of users of its own, but you can't say the same for activity. In practice, you will see the same old users basically try to carry instances on their backs when they're the only ones posting.
And the reality of it is, is that Lemmy has absorbed Reddit's rejects. I'm talking, reddit users who were a problem over in Reddit, probably got banned enough times to be IP/shadow-ban on sight, now they come here. And it is obvious how badly they shit up the place unapologetically.
I know the Fediverse has a long way to go to be an established platform and alternative for people to escape from the other platforms, but if this is the kind of direction it is going, it's going to take twice as long or might not have a future.