Currently everyone is talking about reddit here, which really exposes why the recent wave of people is here. Prior to this it was mostly leftist shitposting mixed with general fediverse discussion. I think the Mastodon side of the fediverse likely experienced something similar in October last year, but I can't really speak to the culture before that because that's the wave that I came over in.

I will say that even though there's a lot of reddit spam right now, this amount of content and discussion is still way more entertaining than it was before. And Lemmygrad is still hanging out in their own little corner. It's just bigger than that now.