I thought the main draw of the Fediverse was the idea of finding a community where you feel like you belong, that fits your interests, but the structure seems to work against that

The main draw is the federated core principles. The specialized community part is sort of a secondary effect.

If Reddit doesn't like your community, your comments, or your account in general, you're gone.

If Reddit wants to make more money off you by forcing ads into their pages and app, most users who don't know how to use an alternate frontend are screwed.

And if Reddit decides they get a legal right to use all your content for AI training, sell your data to advertisers, and add a subscription fee on top, you don't get a choice.

If a federated instance decides they want to cram ads in, the entire federated network of Lemmy/PieFed instances doesn't get affected, and the content from that instance can still be viewed without ads.

Reddit is a monopoly, and thus carries monopoly power over how the platform and its communities operate. The fediverse is distributed, and no instance carries monopoly power over the others. This resists enshittification.

Now, it's true there's less activity here, but that's not always a bad thing, nor is it unexpected. It makes moderation easier, karma farming isn't really a thing, and a smaller platform is just naturally going to have less people engaging with it. But you're here now, and there's now 4 posts and 1 comment that otherwise would not exist had you not joined.

Every new user makes the fediverse more valuable for others. If there's a community you want to exist, start it, and eventually other people will find it too if people who are interested in it join the fediverse.

I'm not here to tell you that this is perfect, or that it's always better to have less people. Having more people means more opinions, niche communities, etc. But you don't get there in a day, and the fediverse is only growing.

We have thematic instances, but as soon as you look at the “All” feed, it just flattens everything back into one generic Reddit clone. If you only look at your local instance to avoid that, you’re just isolating yourself, and at that point, you might as well just use a multireddit on Reddit without needing to make a new account.

Remember that you can follow communities outside your instance, and that is your algorithm. Reddit figures out what you like, and shows you more of it. Lemmy/PieFed asks you what you like, and you have to tell it what to show you more of. I particularly enjoy PieFed because it has "feeds" that combine multiple communities into a larger bundle so it's easy to follow many of them.

If you rely on the "All" feed, that's no different than going to the homepage of Reddit and saying "show me the top posts for today". If you follow communities you like, that's like going to Reddit and saying "show me my personalized feed." The only difference is that you are responsible for personalizing your feed, because there is no algorithm. It's not the most user-friendly, but it also resists algorithmically-optimized retention, which I think we all know isn't great for our attention spans.

The benefit you get from using the fediverse is not being reliant on a corporation's algorithm to determine what you should see, and being on a network that inherently resists enshittification and routes around censorship. The goal is that it becomes large enough for these more niche communities to find an audience larger than just the few who started them.