I think the decline in quality is true. Any time a community gets big enough it becomes a target for manipulation and bots. We try to defend against these, but it’s hard.

Not sure the Lemmy community is at adequacy, but I think we’ve definitely a quality+quantity threshold high enough to be engaging and have new content every day, without having to scroll for hours to see things.

90% of the memes I see are posted by about 3 people that I know by name.