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The original was posted on /r/fediverse by /u/7101334 on 2023-08-23 18:11:32+00:00.

I’ve been trying to get back into the Fediverse and accelerate my abandonment of big corporate social media.

Problem is, I’m having a hard time finding the same kind of content in the Fediverse as I do in the…Corpoverse? There’s no shortage of informative content. I could spend plenty of time discussing coding, or science, or game development, etc.

Pixelfed is decent for hiking and nature photos too. And the number of people posting gardening content on Mastodon is huge, verging on overwhelming.

But those are all acceptable in “polite society”, which isn’t really where I fit in. It feels like a digital high end social event, every profile in a suit or cocktail dress. I don’t belong at those, or desire to belong.

My slightly less mainstream recreational areas of interest are important to me, and I find it much easier to connect with people who share those interests. The Grateful Dead, cannabis, raves/EDM, psychedelics - it’s hard to figure out where to find communities which feature content like that. Both “cannabis” and “psychedelics” bring up generic images in the Pixelfed.social hashtag, almost as if I searched those terms on Google Images. “#PsychedelicArt” is largely AI generated garbage, “#PsychedelicMusic” allegedly has 8 posts but only 2 load - neither featuring any music. “Rave” hashtags don’t really even seem to exist on my instance of Pixelfed, and there’s no obvious signs of Deadhead presence either.

On Reddit, r/psychedelics is huge, and there are more specific subs like r/LSD or r/shrooms. On Lemmy, I could only find c/psychedelics@lemmy.ca, which has received no posts in weeks (at least last time I checked). Attempts to make more specific communities are apparently met with resistance by server admins concerned with legal implications.

I haven’t sought out cannabis groups on Lemmy but I’d be surprised if they had anything like r/microgrowery there.

Combine this with none of my irl friends being on the Fediverse, and me having no luck convincing them, and it makes it very hard to find a space where I feel like there are people like me, with the same interests as me. I want to abandon corporate social media, but in many cases, it seems corporate social media is more willing to provide a space for people like me. I want to meet people I can be wholly myself around, with no filter on my interests, then talk to those people about gardening and hiking and video games and mundane life. Where do I go on the Fediverse to find that?