Try joining more communities.

Have a browse of https://feddit.online/feeds and click ‘Subscribe’ on any subject that looks interesting.

Also explore https://feddit.online/topics

if there are low activity communities you are interested in then click the bell icon so you get every post since they are so low activity. I actually unsubscribed to anything that was not real important for me to find later. So I mostly use subscribe as a way of keeping a list of communities I want to reference. EDITED: I forgot to mention block liberally. Its counterintuitive but good content can get drowned by stuff you don’t like. blocking communities you 100% have no interest in and users who are aweful will keep that rough from hiding the diamonds.

Check out your instance block list. Every instance is blocking and is being blocked by other instances, curating what you see.

I think zip is the instance with the least blocks on piefed, or it was back when I tried it out.

Browsing by subscribed is the best way to go, but you have to subscribe to a bunch of active communities to get the most out of it. It’s no where near like reddit but at least you see the things you want to see.

There must be a way to sort communities in the list by monthly active users, I don’t remember how that works on piefed, but that’s how you would find the most active, organic communities.

Your absolute best bet is to sort All/New, build a filter list of users, communities and instances that you don’t want to see content from and enjoy and active feed of content that interests you. This would never work on a site like reddit but due to the niche nature of the fediverse, it’s the best way to keep from feeling like you’re the only one here.

I use only Subscribed + either Scaled or New.

In the beginning I went to All sometimes, just to see what’s out there. Now I find new communities through those I’m already subscribed to. There’s even one called [email protected]

I also blocked a whole bunch of users that do exactly what you describe: just churn out a bunch of news media links in different communities, usually like 20 at a time, without any … feeling.

So, first of all, there are significantly fewer communities and users here on the Threadiverse. However, there is at least one other major factor, as your home instance isn’t a huge one.

The way Lemmy and Mbin and PieFed work, any given home instance—you’re on feddit.online—doesn’t automatically download content from communities created on remote instances. They don’t even know about remote instances.

It only starts downloading posts and comments and such once at least one user on your instance subscribes to that community.

Your All feed won’t show everything on the Threadiverse. There’s lots of stuff that your instance is oblivious to. It’ll only show the posts from communities on instances that it’s downloading posts from.

For a large instance like lemmy.world, this isn’t a huge factor, but for smaller ones, it’s a bigger issue.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

lemmy.world has 13,155 active users.

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list

feddit.online, which is your home instance, has 164 active users. Probably not many people out searching for and subscribing to new communities!

There is a website that crawls all of the Threadiverse and builds up a list of communities on all instances: lemmyverse.net. They have a page that lets you search through and browse the list of communities:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Unfortunately, this page isn’t made obvious to most new users. Oh, and note that the default setting on that page is to not show NSFW—pornographic—communities, if you’re on the hunt for those, but you can flip that on with the checkbox in the upper left.

But if you go there, you can look through the list of all of the communities out there. If you find a community that you like, say, [email protected], you can click on it to copy the text !photography@lemmy.world, and then search for it using your home instance’s search, and that’ll let your home instance find out about the instance and community if it doesn’t already and if you subscribe to it, it’ll start downloading the content from that instance and show up in the All feed for other users on your home instance.

In general, I recommend that people try to build up a subscribed-to list of communities that they are interested in and then browse Subscribed rather than relying on All. All necessarily is only going to show some of the content out there. It can be a way to find new communities, but it’s always going to miss content, and it’s less-effective for that on smaller home instances.

EDIT: There are also two communities that it’s helpful to be aware of if you’re looking for new communities. You might want to subscribe to these:

• [email protected]: this has people post when they are creating a new community. The caveat is that all of the communities here are going to be empty when posted, and some may not take off.

• [email protected]: This has people post stuff about communities (new or old) to help make them more visible.

In general, I think that lemmyverse.net is a better route than monitoring these communities—much easier to browse a full list of communities—but you might always also get some benefit there, and lemmyverse.net isn’t “part” of the Threadiverse itself, just a convenient search engine/browser, whereas the above two communities are part of the Threadiverse.

I’ve tried “hot/new” and “all” just it seems to be a bunch of RSS feeds with no human context or interaction. With I’m doing something wrong or the communities I’ve joined aren’t active enough or both.

No, you’re right…

To get content, you have to browse /new

To browse /new, you have to block all the idiots spamming reposts from other social media. Otherwise it drowns out all the stuff a human actually posted and cares about.

Fair warning, there’s a shit ton of them. One person has like 20 accounts they rotate thru spam posting, and you’re gonna feel like it’s never ending. But eventually it’s a pretty good experience.

Just block anything you don’t like as you go. It’s more about pruning then curating.

i use All and scaled

I use All+Top 6 hours or Top 1 Hour, and I use Subscribed+Scaled (I subscribe to 400+ comms, so this works really well generally, it’s my default).