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?
Because at the end of the day, they’re all on Reddit. So when reddit says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” you can’t just make another subreddit because they’ll shut that one down too.
If the admin of lemmy.world says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” then you can say okay and make luigimangione@otherlemmyinstance.com. People on Lemmy.world can still access the new site, or even leave Lemmy.world entirely if they decide they’re not down with the admin. But they can still access all of the other federated communities they were subscribed to rather than having to quit Lemmy overall.
What happens if lemmy.world admin forces the hand of the mods of wolrdnews@lemmy.world community to ban such content and then defederate from the madeupinstance.net where the new luigi community is hosted? Isn’t that the same problem as reddit? Lemmy.world users would not be able to see the luigi community at that point right?
Federation doesn’t definitively solve power tripping. It just reduces its impact.
Huge instances like world do undermine that project, so it’s up to us lemmizens (lol) to try and stay independent and spread out.
Lemmy world bans !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Quite a few people switched to other instances when that happened
You can easily create a new account on a different instance. The only thing you lose is your post/comment history, but many apps allow multiple accounts in case you still want access to that.
Ah that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!