Yeah, that is why I stopped posting to every community - it mostly didn't start any conversations.

I'm just posting basically personal journals now that I can reference later to find something, or to send to friends on a subject i care about.

I do really highly value the good conversations and I have here, but they are fairly rare. Maybe 500 bad encounters for 1 great encounter.

Lemmy extremism (in any direction) is quite a challenge, the negativity users meet is a great way to drive people away. We need small niche safe spaces for common interest groups to grow and talk, mini-forums. The current everyone drives-by all and basically puts every post up to a popular referendum hasn't worked.

I said a unpopular thing on a YPTB post awhile back, but I'm sticking with it - People are communal, and they define their communities by a shared interest (belief, experience, geography, etc), but that is just a nice way of saying that communities need a way to EXCLUDE people without that shared interest (two sides of the same coin). Basically we need highly curated opinionated chambers to grow thriving communities where people like to come back as their home base.