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There are some great people here. But unfortunately many are suffering from hard times (that’s me too). It makes for tense vibes. The anger is boiling over everywhere online, I’ve largely stopped participating everywhere and switched to lurker mode. (To be clear, that’s not because I think I’m better, but because it’s not hard to bring out my combative side, and I’d rather not contribute to the problem.)

Do you remember ptz? He and I spoke about the health of this fediverse some months back before he shut down his instance, and we both had the same opinion: things keep getting more toxic here, and Lemmy lacks both the technological solutions for moderation at scale and the community leaders we need to build a better place. One of those can be solved with programming, but the other cannot.

Rule enforcers are not community leaders. Most often the only time I see a mod account is when they’re enforcing a rule. They largely aren’t submitting content and then participating in discussions like normal users. And rules are good (in the communities that actually have some stated rules), but a healthy community is always anchored around interesting individuals who contribute to the subject matter and experiences of that community. Regular users do often take this role, but to have that sort of space created for those users, the founders/mods have to do the hard work breaking that ground. We just aren’t really seeing that here.

(I’m purposely being vague and leaving out specific criticisms because that’s beyond my point and it’s a systemic issue anyway. It’s also not productive to name names because the issue is complicated and we really do need better mod tools first).

These things taken together mean that the best community members don’t stick around. FlyingSquid was a huge participant, and I feel that his exit immediately damaged the quality of Lemmy. We’ve seen that a few times now, and I don’t think the network has recovered.

The bots and astroturfing are out of control here, so if those can be combatted, mods get better tools and enough good community leaders migrate here, then Lemmy might become a lot more like Reddit was during its heyday.

The problem is just not easily solved, and unfortunately I’m not in a position to help even though I’d dearly like there to be more positive online communities.