You’re not alone. I don’t consider Lemmy as my primary social media (thank God I don’t), and I think that a lot of things missing on “The Fediverse” (I hate that name) are due to the community’s fault. Most of the people just upvote and don’t comment. Some of them comment, but don’t even post. And the ones who post are the ones who have more control over what’s popular, I think. Not only that, but the main audience is not diverse, mostly US (but there’s also some europeans) centric, and only interested in programming (and scientific stuff). And they don’t care, because that’s whar they like, and they simply reject the idea of having anything different or popular (there’s comments in this post about how they are happy that there’s no pop culture, and even one claiming pop culture is capitalism distraction, jeesh, go touch grass). Some of them are not welcoming, and don’t like the type of people they would consider “normies”. Now, my view of pop culture is (probably) different of yours, but I’d say that pop culture is one of the cores of social media. And I don’t think this place will grow in a distributed way because normal people like me won’t feel like they belong somewhere like here, they won’t share the content they like, and thus it will make a cycle of lack.

sorry for the long rant, I don’t even think all of that made sense. It’s just something that I felt yo say.