I’ve been on Beehaw and Lemmy.world for the past two weeks now and while people seem to be posting content that isn’t about Reddit or Twitter or how great federated platforms are, such content does not receive as many comments/discussion as topics about the Reddit API controversy, or the current Twitter controversy, etc.
I prefer to sort by “new” when on the main page of either Beehaw or Lemmy.world. Most posts scarcely get a few upvotes and almost no comments. Without comments, I feel far less inclined to leave a comment unless there’s a discussion already going on.
It feels like the gravity of discussion is still mostly centered on complaints and discussion about Reddit (or Big Tech in general), despite this platform being billed as a Reddit replacement. Hopefully that changes with time but there’s a reason I haven’t left Reddit yet.
If you want discussion about something else, you gotta post. The Reddit thing is maybe the number one common interest among basically all Lemmy users right now, so of course it’s going to be the most upvoted thing. But making a post complaining about that fact just exacerbates the problem. If you post about literally anything else then you will be helping the ratio of reddit-related to non-reddit-related posts.