I don’t agree that the vast majority of the people left there are bootlickers.
Most of the people left there seem to be uninterested in technology from the arts and crafts related subs and that’s what’s really missing in Lemmy/kbin.
There is no /c/woodwoking, /c/printmaking or /c/embroidery and the people that usually visit these don’t really care about the underlying tech. Most of the time they just want to share their crafts with their community and things to just work.
I’m almost certain I’ve seen a woodworking community when browsing all.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily a question of subject matter so much as that Lemmy’s user base is simply not large enough yet to sustain active niche communities, and it’s an open question if we can get to that point without degrading the quality of the less focused ones, like /c/crafting or /c/diy.
Will a critical mass be reached where we can create our own communities? At least at beehaw that seems to be handled top down, we had a poll asking what we’d want - does it work that way everywhere? I’d like a local area community, but as you say, who’d participate? I might be it.
