It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
Federation.
There’s a reason why worldnews@lemmy.world and worldnews@lemmy.ml are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
For lemmy, it’s again a federation thing. You just don’t see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.
It’s not the most optimal solution, but it’s still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.
Having read some (but not all) the comments, I do agree with the idea that decentralization (federation) somehow is what helps to alleviate this problem, although it’s such a complex matter that you will have to see how it plays out. For my part, with some exceptions I was more or less satisfied with how Reddit used to be, and part of that was because Reddit was centralized. Reddit not being federated or decentralized is to its benefit because social platforms benefit from having everything all in one place, but what really seems to have done Reddit in was commercialization. It went from being similar to some kind of basic software tool to this corporate nightmare of tracking and ads, algorithmically shaping content, etc. It’s like Facebook now but with a red icon. Lemmy wasn’t designed to do that, and it will never do that. Federation does help with that.
As long as there’s centralization and data brokering, there will always be a capitalization. It’s basically the only logical path forward for a service that isn’t decentralized or running as a charity.
