This is exactly it. I glance at All on Lemmy for maybe 2% of my time here, primarily to see if I can discover a new community that I didn’t previously know about to add to my collection.
But it’s true. The real Lemmy experience is in your subscribed communities.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they’d have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they’d have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos… not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn’t have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this “problem” that they have as being entirely of their own making.
Feel your pain. I’m constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regularly look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn’t care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there’s that.
Please definitely don’t be discouraged in the slightest, TPM.
Single-game forums were almost always the smallest gaming subreddits on Reddit, often times being several orders of magnitude smaller than the “gaming in general” communities.
But that special feeling of having other people passionate about that specific game you love can’t be beat. Hang in there, and you’ll definitely grow and get that engagement in time.
Which is absolutely wild to me, considering that all natively born citizens received their citizenship involuntarily at birth.