This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town.

The place has a much smaller population, of which an even tinier amount is active. So there is much less content published. One solution is to participate more but too few people seem willing to do it. An other solution would be to make the space more attractive to more users but, like you noticed…

The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up.

I’ve been saying since I first joined the Fediverse: default experience is… trash unless you’re looking for some echo chamber for your pre-existing biases. Some may enjoy that experience, I certainly did not, and most people won’t either.

New/default experience should be an empty feed, with a few limited broad suggestions allowing them to slowly get in whatever they’re interested and willing to read (even trash content if that’s their thing).

Learning to use the filtering tools is key and should be encouraged. Personnaly, I have had a real nice and pleasant experience browsing Piefed because I learned to use them: 1) limiting my home page to ‘Subscribed’ only (filtering out all political/memes/low effort content, because 2) I carefully select the communities I’m subscribed to, 3) and since Piefed makes it so simple to filter out keywords and annoying users alike I never hesitate to use that and, non, I don’t care to block them even if we’re already short on users: my time is too precious to waste it with serial haters and complainers, or self-proclaimed white knights for such or such ’noble cause’.

Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight.

I’ve never seen much of any kind of (an information) hygiene, anywhere online. Certainly not on Reddit… save on very few selected subs… exactly like I can see here.

But once again, one can easily filter the worst offender in a matter of seconds. Then, it’s up to anyone to stick to it: once I blocked them, I certainly don’t ‘check from time to time’ to see if they’re getting any better. I let them play in their shit pool to their heart’s content, throwing more of it at one another: it doesn’t concern me anymore. And for that I must say I quite like the filtering tools piefed gives us.

the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly,

It depends where you look at. When I joined (two or three years ago? I was on Lemmy, before switching to Piefed) the amount of sheer hate that was expressed and that I witnessed was… disturbing, to say the least. I don’t think it has become worse but I could not tell since I learned to filter the sources out.

I wish for the devs to more seriously consider the out of the box experience for a new user and, maybe, consider that not all new users will share their political/personal/philosophical values or biases. I certainly don’t agree with many of the ideas I can see expressed around here, but I’m also old enough to be fine with people having different opinions, and patient enough to see if I can make the tool work more like I want it to and reduce what I consider noise.

Genuine question: is there a moderation or federation difference between Lemmy and PieFed? Because I don’t feel like Lemmy is dead or racist. Idk maybe I just blocked a bunch of communities and forgot. I think it probably because discuss.online is doing it right.