I joined mander.xyz because it has a central theme around the natural sciences. It could possibly include STEM content as well; there is an ongoing discussion about it. The admin(s) are present and very responsive.

For anyone with a love of science and/or nature I recommend it highly as a home instance of Lemmy.

“Like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass,” the CEO wrote.

This is true. By sheer population most Redditors never left. But I’d say a core percentage responsible for actually making content has moved on and won’t be back.

It’s getting better! All the time! This was just posted yesterday.

The newsgroup server I’m on is actually called eternal-september.org in remembrance.

Same here as well. I uninstalled rif and replaced its icon with Jerboa. I don’t even notice the difference until the screen loads 😄

My personal take on it is that such behavior comes from the large-site mentality. Smaller subs initially do have higher levels of discourse, but each posting account is still sharing a karma score across the entire site. Eventually it shifts to discussion-ending posts with high upvotes.

I have high hopes that the decentralized nature of things like Lemmy will help preserve quality topic discussion. Lemmy.ml being overloaded pushed me to find a server instance more in line with my individual topics and ending up joining a very nice science community. Shout-out to Mander.xyz