It’s not the kids, not the lurkers, not the mods… y’all just nice people. Lemmy’s got a good vibe going… or at least enough windows that we can close if the vibe gets shit.
The reason is federation. People actually happen to be pretty good at holding each other accountable and self-regulating when there isn’t a central authority deciding what is and isn’t acceptable. Bad actors naturally gravitate toward the instances that welcome them, and then the rest of us defederate from those instances to maintain the peace. Those bad instances then stagnate or fizzle out from the inactivity.
On centralized social media, what stays and goes isn’t dictated by the community but a handful of people at the top, and troublemakers are often given a bigger platform than they would have had otherwise.
Mastadon is a lot bigger and older than Lemmy is, and yet it still has the same vibe as this place.
So instances choose which instances to federate with? Does this mean that if my account is on lemmy.world that I’m seeing a selection of what that instance’s owners choose?
Other way around most of the time. Instances choose who to defederate with. If you view all posts instead of local You’ll see posts across the fediverse so long as the instance owner hasn’t defederated. Defederation is also a pretty nuclear option so it’s generally not taken lightly.
