Podcasts are so SLOW though! I would rather read something for 5-15 minutes then to have it talked at me for an hour, at a pace almost entirely not of my choosing (though if I must listen I will usually increase it to ~2x rate), with no ability to search through it again later to jog my memory.
There is a reason that people consider podcasts as something for bored people to do while driving or being driven somewhere (e.g. riding in a train). Podcasts are done by people who enjoy hearing the sound of their own voices - they have a timeslot to fill (e.g. an hour) and they will fill that space to take exactly that time regardless of whether the content would have been better served by being presented in other means.
i.e. they are for entertainment, not primarily information delivery.
Music is also for entertainment, but unlike podcasts if the music would be better to last let's say 3 minutes than 5, then it will be adjusted in that manner. By repetitive practice and continual edits, the music will get better and better, whereas a one-off podcast that is pooped out on the spot for the purpose of either capitalistic gain or at least fame for the podcaster can be enjoyable to some, but does not improve. Of course some podcasts are better than some music productions.
Podcasts have their niche, ofc. But a good podcast might succeed almost in spite of the podcast format, rather than because of it?
Wait... when did you ever need to turn off your PC before you can unplug your mouse or keyboard? Did people genuinely used to need to do this? When? Why?
That's the part I was reacting to - it's non-inclusive, as opposed to e.g. Threadiverse or wider terms such as Fediverse or Social Media or even Internet.
That's like assuming that every person you talk to on the internet is a neurotypical cishet man, or that everyone on Reddit is from the USA - even if statistically speaking true, it is not very welcoming, nor terribly precise.
Then again, this is!memes@lemmy.world... which tbf is Lemmy. Though the way the ActivityPub Protocol works is that you don't "go on lemmy" so much as your software of choice goes to grab it for you. And it is great to have choices for how we want to share content together!
I doubt Lemmy will ever do this - e.g. moderator reports still don't federate to other instances until the release of v1.0, despite the Rexodus having been several years in the past now. Basically any solution would have to be on top of the software without needing any changes within it. Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.
Although predictably PieFed already has this functionality, for well over a year now. For one it has hashtags, plus user and post flairs, and for another it has categories of communities where someone can look at e.g. news across all regions, or pick let's say Europe and then choose from various sub-topics below that. Also, while these Topic areas are defined by the instance admins, the otherwise identical concept of topical Feeds are user-customizeable and even shareable, so someone has likely made what you are looking for already, but if not then you could make it and share with others to benefit from your efforts.
At worst even, say when interacting with existing communities that did not want to actively participate in the process of self-sorting their own content, users have keyword filters that can be used so that you as an end-user can do it entirely on your own. Such community discovery and management concerns are a solved problem on PieFed. I say this full well as someone who had the identical issue you described here when I was on Lemmy, and moving to PieFed solved it for me.
The developers are also extremely receptive to feedback, if you needed still more changes made to the code. I sincerely doubt that you will ever get a solution going using Lemmy - this identical (edit: general) concept has already been asked for many times over the years - but switching to PieFed should easily take care of it, offering multiple possibilities to make finding the content that you want easier.
Except your instance is using PieFed! There's also Mbin, nodeBB, flarum says that they will join, Mbin and PieFed also share with Mastodon, ... it's a party up in here alright! 🥳🎉🎊
I mean... some people are royal jerks, and would do exactly that, yes.:-P
It doesn't make it right, just bc it happens.