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Never really understood the thought process "If I move to a different place, it'll definitely be magically free of arseholes and people I disagree with." It's just not reflective of reality - wherever you go, there'll be arseholes. Just build your Subscribed feed, dip into All occasionally to se what else is out there, find an instance that takes moderation seriously and aren't actual fascists and block the strays that occasionally make it through.
And OOP is right to say Lemmy has backend issues. The dev team of 2 people is too small and they really need to make safety a massive priority ASAP. Being able to block instances as a user is a big step forward (planned in the next major release I believe) but both mod and admin tools need to be much better and they need to do a lot more to tackle CSAM hits. I hope they're taking note of the various projects @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com has begun to tackle these issues.
In terms of the size of the Lemmyverse, I don't really give a shit about that. What I care about is quality rather than quantity and it stands to reason that as quality continues to improve (as I believe it is) then quantity will follow in its wake.
OOP seems to forget that Lemmy only got as big as it is right now about 4 months ago - of course there's a lack of niche communities and of course there's a lack of tools. Poor old Ernst developing KBin got hit with tens of thousands of users for software that wasn't even out of Alpha.
The best things we can do as users is create good content, encourage discussion etc even when it feels like we're talking into the void. Because sooner or later, if the content is good, people will engage. We're not at that tipping point yet but it'll come if we put the effort in.
All alternative platforms should be assumed to be at least 50% rancid garbage, because that's where all the people banned from the mainstream platforms inevitably go.
The fact that lemmy isn't 90% flat earthers and crypto spam is actually astounding and i don't know how on earth this has been achieved. Especially considering how suboptimal the moderation tools are it's really impressive how good the content here is.
Well, I think the people here prior to Rexit were already producing good content and then the people who moved over from Reddit were primarily people annoyed by u/spez and who valued content quality and genuinely wanted a decent platform. There'll be times when things get shitty but by and large I do think Lemmy had a good start. We just really need the devs to give some power to instance admins and Mods via decent tools, because the one thing that will kill progress is people not being able to curate and protect their Communities.
The devs' politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it's a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you'd often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I'm not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.
Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.
I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I'm sure they're capable of working through the issues we're facing today, but I don't think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.