This is what happens when a person misunderstands that material conditions guide community growth and that physically brute forcing a community from one to another requires a very considerable amount of effort and care to perform.
A community grows in steps, at each step of the way policy is formed based on occurrences in that community and culture alongside it. Each new policy and the resultant culture is formed out of every previous thing that ever occurred in that community.
A bunch of people are there but they’re there for a different kind of community, a different kind of content, a different kind of culture.
In order to transition a community from one thing you don’t want it to be to another very different thing you need to consider things such as who the users are. You will need to reshape who the userbase is in order to cross a threshold from disapproval to approval. Slow purges are required to achieve this in a number of ways. One of the benefits of purges is that if you’re removing one “type” of person you’re usually making a community attractive to a different type. This obviously assumes that you have the growth to absorb the losses of the purges too. Also this can’t happen in a short timeframe, it’s a process that takes at least half a year to get right.
You will need to reshape who the userbase is in order to cross a threshold from disapproval to approval. Slow purges are required to achieve this in a number of ways. One of the benefits of purges is that if you’re removing one “type” of person you’re usually making a community attractive to a different type.
Small example: Hexbear :gui-trans:
Two rounds of purging over a few months of anti trans posters to make Hexbear safer for trans ppl