i think that your experience is the most common experience that moonlighting & ex-redditors have with lemmy and is the biggest “sore spot” that most lemmings have.
like you, i hate how big tech enshitifies social media and that’s been making me move from one social media platform to the next since the 1990’s (since before it was called social media). i’m convinced that the enshitification is pushed by big tech’s investors in an effort to squeeze out as much profits from the platform as possible; resulting in the types of enshitification that you see on reddit, or facebook, or bluesky or etc. i think that this fact gives lemmy the best chance out of NOT enshitifying, or at least not as fast as reddit or bluesky did.
i used to be on reddit too, but lemmy works better for me and i think it’s because of what it was designed to do; it’s as if all the left leaning political subreddits (eg r/communism, r/socialism, r/anarchy, r/politics, etc.) got together to create their own social media safe space on the fediverse away from reddit’s toxicity. so they did in lemmy and; when the investors pushed u/spez to enshitify reddit; a whole bunch of people left reddit and filled the ranks of lemmy.
when that happened this tankie safe space did the same thing that its real-world counterpart safe-spaces-for-the-ostracized spaces do. like gay neighborhoods, they got gentrified by a MUCH LARGER group of people with better finances and social connections and, during the transition, there’s lots of things that the gentrifiers don’t like, like late night loud music; or lack of schools; or the “politics” (in this specific situation).
the gentrifiers usually succeed eventually and those pesky life-altering politics will be pushed aside like the high rents & $10 coffee shops push away the artists and agitators that originally made the neighborhood an attractive place to inhabit and they’ll go do it all over again in some other neighborhood somewhere else once they’re successfully pushed out where the cycle of humanity repeats itself all over again.
It’s only seems like doomsday if you don’t learn from the people who had encountered it before and wrote down their experiences.
Empowerment is a side affect of knowledge; yet most Americans will never bother to avail themselves to the knowledge from people like marx or MLK Jr and that only leads us to those needful mental health breaks over and over again without ever fixing the root cause.