I've written this before but I am comfortable here, it reminds me of the text chat groups in Usenet, the first 'social medium' I was part of. Not mainstream but enough people.
I keep a Lemmy-World cocktails community and in this nine months have had to moderate exactly one post and read exactly one report. Users grow in number, slowly, every day. It is So Nice here. Could there be more engagement? Sure. But high quality overall, a lot of what is missing is the crap.