If it helps to share my perspective: I almost left the Fediverse entirely after Kbin.social fell apart and my only options were to either move to Lemmy, return to Reddit, or go literally nowhere (online I mean, so I would e.g. read books and play games irl, basically touch grass, but avoid social media entirely - it's not nearly as difficult as people say, I've done it a good fraction of my life actually, bc I know I have an addictive personality and especially a corporate run one would feed into that).

So I decided to give Lemmy a try, despite knowing it was run by tankies. And while I suck at posting content that people enjoy, I tried in my own way to make people feel more welcomed by commenting on existing posts, to make them more lively.

Though when I commented in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net that at least Biden had lowered gasoline prices, and while that was not everything it also was not nothing, and did help the poorest people who need that, I got replies for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. And then again for a similar comment made in lemmygrad.ml (my instances apparently at the time had defederated from neither). It was very toxic, and I don't need that shit in my life. Literally nothing - as in no social media - would have been preferable.

But then I noticed that nearly all of the toxicity that I saw at the time was coming from the big 3 tankie instances. Since leaning that, my experiences on the Fediverse have greatly improved!

Note this has nothing to do with "politics" and everything to do with CONSENT to receive their bullshit, alternative-fact takes shoved down my throat (continuing for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time - who does that!? outside of those instances I mean). And to be fair, if that's how they want to be then okay then, you do you, except: it would have been nice to have been warned?

A LARGE part of what is turning people away from the Fediverse is its toxicity. And the lack of features such as proper labeling of communities isn't helping any. The desktop web UI shows the sidebar, which would have explained to me that ChapoTrapHouse is all about dunking onto liberals - OOOOHHHH, so maybe I don't want to make a comment there that isn't 100% trashing Biden? Good to know, thanks! - but the mobile web UI does not do that, e.g. for posts found via All, and neither does a good many apps such as Voyager.

It's not ready for a mainstream audience yet, technologically speaking. Hence most hobbiests remain on Reddit, or else literally eschew social media altogether. That's better than the alternative - apparently - i.e. coming here and getting "dunked on", like the above commentor talking about being so heavily downvoted. We are not very welcoming here, hence people don't want to come here. I know that 100% of the people I've recommended to try it have not liked it. It's going to take some work to clean ourselves up if we want hobbiests to feel like Lemmy is worthwhile for them. (And frankly I expect it will never happen, but I am putting my hopes into PieFed, or Sublinks if it revives, bc PieFed already has features that make it welcoming, like showing the sidebar text below every single post - mind you its Notifications feature is barely functional so it is not ready for a mainstream audience either, but the fact that such welcoming features are already present is heartwarming! ❤️💕:-)

I have managed to actively avoid politics during my time here, although on most servers it does require ignoring Local and always ignoring All—far too many communities to block. ani.social has a very safe Local to check for avoiding politics, it's just anime and manga.

Because it's not just explicitly political communities that are chock-full of politics, they are also in meme communities. Someone posts some depressing "relatable" meme and the comments will have people saying "yeah I hate [politician they believe caused the depressing thing in the meme]" or something like that. Whether they have a point or not, and even when I outright agree wholeheartedly it is exhausting. Certain communities post news about their specific topic which sometimes intersects with politics and so that attracts political comments too.

But I can say with the active political avoidance tactic I do pretty good. I will check out new communities via !newcommunities@lemmy.world and sometimes check an instance's community list and browse random posts on a community that mildly interested me, that is how I still get content discovery.

Also, the problem is the number of users. Neurodivergence is, as far as I know, not the statistical majority. Finding 1 neurodivergent in 100 people is a lot easier than 1 neurodivergent people in 3. I'm neurodivergent, I also stick to the things I'm interested in here. So I am probably a lot harder to find unless you share my interests.

Oof, I take it you're pretty disenchanted upon all this shizzle...?