You’ve received quite a few thoughtful and well constructed responses already so I don’t know that I feel the need to add in my two cents for the first part of the question, but I will at least try to add some context for the second part.

Like a lot of places on the internet that involve sex, the ratio of men to women is extraordinarily uneven. I’ve seen numerous women delete their accounts because of the amount of attention they’ve received after posting(in a similar vein deleting content is not easy due to the way federation works). The community of men posting content(aside from just genitalia shots) tends to not receive very much attention and a small number of dedicated users drive most of the interaction.

Even this thread alone has received more responses than the vast majority of all threads on the instance. I don’t mean this in a confrontational manner, but as someone who has been around since this instances inception I guarantee that if this same topic was not posted by an objectively attractive women it would be lucky to only have received a quarter of the attention it has. I will concede though that this is in no small part due to your genuine and thoughtful responses.

A lot of topics also need a large population of users to survive in a general space. To use one of your examples, to find a satisfactory partner for a niche RP topic will likely not be successful. If people don’t find what they’re looking for, they will stop looking. This critical mass of users is just not here yet, if it ever will be.

The community on Lemmy overall is also very techy and chronically online(even worse than Reddit) - a crowd that is not typically associated with high levels of charisma and rhetoric or social skills in general. The overall Lemmy community is also small enough that basically every post reach the Reddit equivalent of “all” or “hot” for those that have NSFW enabled and in general people have not been as nice and as open-minded as a sex positive space requires. The mods do good work, but they are only human.

Things have gotten better over the past year, but it’s not quite there yet. I would like to say that I appreciate you Beth and the wonderful discussion you’ve provoked ☺️