First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.
Having said that, it would be better if lemmy’s userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.
If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.
And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.
So the question is:
- In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.
The issues you are seeing are due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, your local timeline would be fuller. With a bigger userbase, you would be able to see plenty of content in non-meme communities and non-politics community.
“All” is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from “Local” if that’s what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they’re just browsing as guest, they literally can’t subscribe or do any kind of curation.
First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.
So to get a bigger userbase, the “default, guest experience” needs to provide a good first impression. This…preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.
I agree. First impressions are important. Perhaps there could be some “click here to change timeline” in the UI?
But again, this is mainly an issue due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, the memes and politics would not be so prevalent, hopefully. We would have smaller, text-based communities taking some of the attention.
You seem to be ignoring the problem, which is that the default guest experience of lemmy will filter out all the people who would solve the problem. “Increase the user base” only helps if the users who join aren’t depressed doomers.
You could mitigate the problem of the small userbase with our current userbase, by just, for example, posting more of type X and less of type Y. That would be one answer to this post: what can one do, individually, to increase the userbase.