this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Some interests are niche enough to be a turn off to a general audience though. When a new user shows up for the very first time and only sees two dozen hentai feet pics or whoever the fuck Matty Perez is as their entire feed it can be confusing. When they need to actively seek out content with general appeal it will make it seem like this is essentially only a fetish community. At a certain point it does become a detracting factor towards attracting new users.
I agree that these things take time and that there will be more waves of new users once porn bans are in place on larger platforms, but unless there is a stable amount of content with general appeal as a 'hook' to keep people coming back it will be difficult to see any real growth.
In my opinion this entire instance seems to be having an identity crisis. It's trying to emulate too many different platforms at once without having the user base to successfully do this.
You're right that the default sorting being local-active definitely doesn't help. The new user experience for Lemmy in general has issues at its core unfortunately. Setting communities as default is an easy solution, but would have its own set of issues.
I don't think it's a bad solution to have defaults, but it would require pretty clear and heavy moderation, likely from admins themselves. This would also have the secondary effect of forcing admins to take a stance on what kind of content should primarily be on the instance. All of this also ignores how feasible something like that would be across all the varying apps and front ends, which I have no idea.