What is this “passing lane” of which you speak? All I’ve ever seen in America is the fast lane and the slow lane(s).

And only end up being farther back than if they had just stayed put, as everybody else had the same thought, making the new lane the slower one.

I’ve actually considered making other accounts to separate content out by blocking different communities on them, but I’ve never really felt the desire to filter out the memes enough to go through with it.

I’m somehow in a similar yet completely different boat from you. My feed under all is made up of like 5 communities - memes, lemmy memes, 196, linux memes, and programmer humor - with guest appearances by politics and technology. Regardless of what I set the filter on my feed to, I have yet to see a single piece of porn crop up; and I had to specifically find a search tool on my pc to find some communities to subscribe to like an r/foodporn equivalent just so I would at least have some stuff pop up on my phone with some more variety related to my interests.

This is probably all related to Lemmy being new and not knowing how to get the most out of the app I’m using (and that being new as well), but as of right now I’m largely using Lemmy the way I used to use Twitter X or something rather than how I used to use Reddit. As a time waster rather than a place where I got invested in the communities I interacted with.

This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.

There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.

It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.

Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.