What do you want to have in a Lemmy instance?

TL;DR: Only use Subscribed, or block all the politics and Linux communities, although you'll probably never completely escape US politics. Also, non-tech is there, just not getting much engagement.

I only look at Subscribed to avoid all the depressing posts. Linux I can scroll by, politics is often emotionally-charged and upsetting. And even if you block all the politics there are non-political communities still posting articles about how X awful thing is happening. Useful? Probably. On topic? Yes. It is fine to want, get, and post links to news articles on a link aggregator site. But personally it makes me doomspiral about how many things are wrong with the world and I come here to have fun. I stay informed elsewhere. I think taking a similar approach could help people annoyed by all the US politics and Linux.

Then again, I'm aware people probably have a higher tolerance for miseryposting than I do (I am overly sensitive/prone to doomscrolling so I really need to not see it—have not doomscrolled and wasted time to it ever since I started heavily curating my online life like this and I feel a lot better) and so they put up with it to see new stuff on Local or All, in exchange for seeing too much of the stuff they don't like or have any interest in (in this case, US politics and Linux). I do not particularly care too much about seeing new stuff, which makes the tradeoff of staying insulated against things I don't want to see versus not being exposed to anything new worth it for me. People who do care about seeing new stuff might be better off with the blocking approach, which could probably remove most Linux and US politics with a relatively small count of blocks. Although you'll still probably encounter some: I know will still leave a ton of "life sucks" memes with the comment full of "I agree, I wish healthcare wasn't so bad" or something else that's just a reminder of US politics. Or Bad Thing Happened news that people in the comments attribute partially to a US political decision. Back when I used Reddit I went to r/therestofthefuckingowl for tutorials that were funny because of how they skip important instructions, leaving a beautiful final product and no idea how to get there. Thought it would be nice and fun. There's a moneymaking tutorial there that I personally feel was posted as political commentary, with all the comments full of 1. be rich 2. don't not be rich and anger against out-of-touch rich people and you guessed it, US politics-specific complaints about things they think are making life hard for not-rich people. But because the tutorial really did fit the skipping important instructions format the comments full of political yelling and real life angsting got to stayed up on a sub that was supposed to be fun, not yet another "world sucks, fuck the rich elites" misery/anger central. (Yes, I agree with a lot of these politics people post even! I just am usually not looking for this online and do not want it to pervade every space.) You can probably never escape it completely.

The trouble with a lot of non-tech communities is that they exist, but are often small and don't get much engagement. I'm lucky enough to be in some that do, but even so I'm one of the primary posters… can't do much about the demographics and interests here, all you can reasonably expect is for them to not be mean to people who differ.