TheFogan
Simply put, I disagree.
Here’s the fact of small groups that are made for the “outs”. The same pattern we’ve seen for every single “free speach” social media site. Bottom line is every social media site, has some level of what I’d agree is bad moderation that’s blatently banning people for say things like saying things to address police violence, income inequality etc… Things that are legitimate subjects that should be open to discussion.
However, 90% of people who get banned from social media, are people doing things that no one outside of their echo chamber want to be anywhere near, literal pro Nazi’s, White Supremicists etc…
The problem is, in general say if we magically turned all moderation off on say facebook, and let everyone back on, that would be relatively low impact, the non nazi’s would be 99%, the nazi’s would be the relatively small niche.
However, most people aren’t leaving their existing social media websites. Which means people looking for new social network sites, are disproportionately people that no one wants to be associated with. So when a new social media site opens up, promising not to moderate them… (Miwi, Truth, Gab, Parlor etc…). in 2 seconds it becomes flooded with people that, quite simply put scare off anyone who isn’t them away.
So long and short, in a new social network, if you don’t keep out the very extreme. You’ll never be able to develop a community around that isn’t extremes.
In short, simply lemmy has been slowly growing by tiny amounts for a year… but it hasn’t gotten nearly ready for major growth. Then reddit of course did the huge things causing lemmy to grow at 10x it’s normal predicted amount, and because it’s especially people from reddit, many of which don’t really understand federation yet. They assumed joining the main instance is the way to do it. (rather than understanding that almost all instances can communicate with eachother).
In short it’s a perfect storm for excessive growth on too small of a segment. on a network that wasn’t prepared for the sudden increase in demand.
Nah wouldn’t say reddit’s implimenting of dumb features was the problem, I mean new reddit sucked but nobody really quit when they still had old.reddit.com. The killer was removing good features.