Update: post deleted Most popular thread on /r/Redditalternatives is promoting Discuit, despite it having 185 weekly active users compared to the 44k on Lemmy. Feel free to chime in

There’s a thousand different ones.

I just opened the following instances without being logged on

• https://lemm.ee/
• https://lemmy.zip/
• https://discuss.tchncs.de/
• https://sh.itjust.works/
• https://lemmy.world/

The same posts are there. You would only get a very different All feed on something like https://beehaw.org, but they are quite unique in that regard.

There is https://piefed.social/topic/chilling:-). It is too early to be recommending PieFed for a mainstream non-technical person to make an account on, but perhaps you could use that as an example to represent what such a feed could look like?

Though I for one am loving PieFed so far:-). I do have to fall back onto Lemmy quite often for tasks such as searching or performing mod duties or previewing how content will look prior to posting, but there are so many things that PieFed can do that Lemmy cannot. Like resolve 50 notifications with one button press, and either enable or disable notifications on a per-item basis (a comment or post or even an entire community, whatever), and block all users from an instance, and it embeds YouTube to show a preview and watch without leaving the site (in fairness, Tesseract likewise can do the latter for Lemmy, and also uniquely adds doing that for Loops videos as well - see it in action here).

For people who like to fine-tune the control of their environment, regardless of whether they use Arch Linux btw, PieFed is really awesome... so long as you know how to fall back onto a Lemmy (Mbin?) when you need it. i.e. for the early adopter mindset it's a great (almost) daily driver already. And this even without knowing how to code, but for someone wanting to run their own instance it's even more amazing since it uses Python rather than Rust for the back-end. (There's also Sublinks that uses Java, but no developments have been announced for a long time due to family issues by the main developer).

It is interesting how people get different results. My process has been to simply block a user or instance when it's obvious nothing from there will ever be interesting to me. I haven't had to do that a lot though, and I don't see any of what you suggest. Then again, while I see mostly Lemmy content, I use Mbin, so perhaps that's part of it as well. Some instances might preblock better than others.

I do think the learning curve is higher than traditional social media. Not that it's hard, but the average person wants a plug and play without having to do anything. The caveat of having a preset curation of "safe" feed is that most people don't explore past that, and it's the random stuff that wanders in that makes things more interesting.