I like this site vastly more than its closest competitor, Reddit. There’s noticeably less of a bot problem here too. You can get downvoted for saying stupid shit but you don’t get silenced or punished for it. The only problem is that this site is so small. The front page is just VetOfTheSeas and everybody else lol. There was a surge of new users back in 2023 because of the stupid API thing but nothing after that.
The default Lemmy UI “front page” is posts that are “Active”. First, try setting it to “Scaled” and you’ll get much more variety of posts instead of just the ones with the most replies. You can set this as a setting each time you visit Lemmy, or edit your Lemmy profile so it defaults to “Scaled” all the time you visit.
Second, start cultivating Lemmy communities you like. “Subscribe” to communities and block the ones you don’t like. Your “front page” will have lots more content you like and far fewer of things you don’t care about.
Third, some poster are consistently too far away from from what I want to consume on the internet. You’ll know them when you see them where everything they post something you wish you didn’t have to see. Block these users and you won’t see their posts or their comments on other posts. None of these change affect what other people see so there’s not risk of harming others or censoring them for others. They are free to continue to be seen by whomever else doesn’t want to block them.
With these three changes I have found Lemmy to be a much more engaging place.