Notifications are a pain point:
giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.
They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.
They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.
And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.
I think the problem is just that Lemmy is small still. As it gets larger it will be arguably much harder for anyone to control things. That said, the echo chamber effect is going to happen no matter what because of how human social interactions work. People tend to gravitate to places that agree with them, and as (American) political discourse continues on its current track, there will be even less middle ground possible to encourage any sort of interaction. Pair that with the (American) right’s being okay with groups of people that wish to infringe on other people’s right to exist and it makes a lot of sense the groups wouldn’t wish to interact.