Ask Lemmy

I come on here every so often to see what's going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:

1. This place feels dead. It's usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.

2. The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I'm seeing more and more gross content that's either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn't get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit's moderation is, it's still not this bad.

3. Outside of the tech communities, there's no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation... and nobody cares? People don't criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I've seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what's even happening?

I don't know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that's not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?