Mags should moderate themselves. Going back to the Reddit analogy, if a subreddit mixed memes and useful content, and I didn't want to see memes, I'd stop following that subreddit.
This is not reddit here. This is more like chaos. Reddit is an example of an instance completely defederated, with only one authority. You cannot expect the same here when you federate with everyone.
Neither do I, but that's ironically what we'd both get if we followed your suggestion of defederating from "generic" instances. Most useful and informative communities I follow right now are on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. If we defederate from them just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times, we would both lose access to most informative communities in this space.
No, they would probably post their useful information in a federation which promotes quality.
"just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times"
As if I was the problem. We are only one month in. What do you think will happen in 6 months? Do you really believe that new users will follow your routine to block every sub posting trash? Of course they won't! They will follow the link to a federation that fit their style. Why not? What's the big fuss about federating with a select group of instance? Whats the drama about? I don't get it.
Every time someone mention defederation it's like we kicked a hornet's nest. People will run away from memes. And defederation is an adequate tool for this. You can stay if you want, other people will leave.
If, however, we simply filter some of the most active communities' content out, and enable users to keep blocking out stuff they don't want to see at all, you can get a good mix of all the content you follow, and you can still go directly to the communities in which you want to read every single thread and read every single thread. We could even have a /sub and a /filtered-sub, where in the first one you'd see aboslutely everything, and in the second one you'd have a Reddit style sub tab with a mix of content of the various communities you follow.
You won't win this race. Eventually people wanting quality will rejoin people wanting quality on another federation.
And that's fine IMO. /r/all was unusable on Reddit, too, and I think that's fine because it's not made for you or me. Some of my friends loved /r/all, though, and refused to use the sub only view. I think like on Reddit, /all is meant for people who want to see content from absolutely everything and like living in chaos, basically. I personally don't see the point of that, so I'd rather follow /sub. But I want /sub to have all of communities I follow, and not have most communities arbitrarily cut out because, again, you alone don't like memes.
Fine, you are welcome to stay with the meme enjoyers. It makes me wonder why you are not on reddit. If reddit "does it so well" why didn't you stay on reddit?