I know that recent drama has caused a bit of uneasiness in the community for this platforms future, but I am optimistic for lemmy. It might be helpful to look to mastodon to learn how to move forward.
I was never extremely active on Mastodon until recently but I followed it's development relatively closely from its infancy. And I will say that it's really strange to watch lemmy face nearly identical issues that Mastodon did when it was in a similar development stages. (Though, some of the drama thus far have been essentially a speedrun of what mastodon went thru over a gradual amount of time.)
The fediverse as a whole is essentially a return to the Internets roots, and with that comes new problems that OG internet communities did not have to grapple with due to the changes the internet has faced in the past few years alone. When building communities, most large internet communities have been largely corporate since the rapid centralization of the internet of the mid 2000s. There is truly no blueprint for this, and the volunteers that are making these communities from scratch are going to make mistakes (as we have already witnessed more than once, even this week alone.)
A large issue that has resulted from the corporate centralization of the internet that is really hard to break from is the expectation of an extremely smooth streamlined experience on emerging platforms like lemmy from new users. And you aren't going to get that in these early days. You just aren't. Things are going to be messy, we are just getting our feet on the ground. And this results in a lot of frustration and just generally a feeling of walking on thin ice with a user base that has been largely built initially from the exodus of an already established platform. To many regular lemmy users there's this expectation that tends to be "well, if other social media platforms can do it, why can't we?" and to admins and those building these communities it can be frustrating and feel like the users are being entitled to things that just aren't possible from volunteers at this time.
With recent drama and inter community issues, the honeymoon phase of this place is officially ending and how we move forward is entirely dependent on how we respond as a community as well as what people using this platform as a whole want from it. You get what you put in.
I don't say this to discount the drama that lemmy has faced these past few weeks but if you honestly think that this place has been toxic so far, the early days of Mastodon would have seemed like pure hell in comparison. Early Mastodon drama was like, doxxings, entire instance admins quite literally being chasing off their own sites over petty nonsense, things like that. It was bad. Really bad. And despite the existence of fedidrama, that stuff has stabilized. Why? Because the community stabilized and gradually formed their own cultures and the community volunteers building communities learned from their mistakes. People moved to smaller communities and stopped being hostile to decentralization. The necessity of defederation was embraced by most who began to understand its importance.
Some of the biggest issues lemmy has right now aren't easy to solve, but we have a blueprint to what solutions worked and what didn't from Mastodon. There's also the issue with lemmy having a generally different culture from Mastodon, and that's OK. We want our own community identity, not the same as Reddit or Mastodon or Twitter. In many ways that is already being built as well.
Right now, the biggest thing is just sticking with this place and persevering the growing pains. It is so easy to get burnt out, and the Mastodon instances that got too big for the admins to actually deal with are clear examples of that. I know it's easy to look at recent events and feel disappointment as well as feel that just generally the most toxic Redditors migrated over, but doing that is just giving up before we even began. If you used Mastodon in it's early days, it fucking sucked so bad. We have a leg up here that it's overall easier to navigate communities and discussions out of the box (and with the current development, it's only going to get better.)
Nah, the most toxic redditors will never leave reddit. Their souls will be consumed in agony as it collapses into a fiery little black hole of hate. The ones who made it over here can't be all bad no matter how stupid some of them appear at first glance.
this place is toxic like never before.
You mean c/fediverse? Or lemmy.ml? Or all of lemmy? Or all of the fediverse? Or the whole world?
Fedi is all about different communities coexisting, sometimes uneasily, alongside each other. Lemmy doesn't need to have only one monolithic community identity. I hope it grows in scope and diversity until everyone can find one that suits them.
I've been on the fedi coming up to 15 years soon.
this year has been the worst.
Ah, I see. I was only around the past few years but over that much time it has changed a lot for sure. There's more of everything. If you preferred the old-school fedi experience though it seems like lemmy is the wrong place to look, as it's designed to be something else. As is mastodon for that matter. There still exist quiet corners where people do things more in keeping with the old ways. The ones where I started have since disappeared but hopefully some will hang together.
what about Lemmy's design lends to toxicity?
why was that all but missing until a couple months ago?
The combination of users and communities in a single space.
On the regular fediverse, if there is an instance that doesn't moderate transphobia, I can just defederate my instance from it, because the only content on there will be generated by folk who either generate transphobia or are ok sharing an instance with people who generate transphobia.
On the threadiverse though, communities change that. Because there might be a trans friendly community, moderated by trans folk, whilst the instance itself doesn't moderate strongly for transphobia. If I defederate it, my users lose access to everyone on the threadiverse that uses that community, whatever instance they're from. Combine this with the generally underwhelming willingness of admins on the threadiverse to deal with transphobia (compared to the microblogging fediverse) and the end result is more transphobia on the threadiverse.
It would be different if the threadiverse had a large extant culture with strongly inclusive norms prior to the reddit migration, but it didn't, and the new lemmy mega instances that have popped brought reddit's vague tolerance of transphobia with them.
that's a good point, maybe each community needs to be it's own instance.
That doesn't work either unfortunately, because there are way more communities than there are instances, and it simply wouldn't scale.
I wonder how workable an equivalent to the mastodon "silence" feature would be, where all content from a silenced instance is dropped unless it comes via a community that one of our users is subscribed to.
more instances are better
Sure, but someone has to run them, and that's the part that doesn't scale
why is that? I can moderate multiple instances, no problem.
It's not the moderation, it's the sys-admin side. It costs money to host, and it takes time and effort. My partner and I currently run two instances, and that's about our limit.
I'm not saying it leads to toxicity necessarily, just that it's something very different than what my first fediverse experience was, which was more about hanging out with a small group of friends. Lemmy seems more about interaction mostly with strangers in large groups like this one, which I also enjoy. Toxicity is probably more a function of it, along with lots of other places, getting flooded with new users who don't know how to behave. Eternal September was a phrase that got passed around a lot for a while over on pleroma. What's happening is analogous to that event (which I was there for) in a lot of ways, even if the details are different. Some places are better insulated from it than others, and this one isn't much at all protected from it as of yet. Like OP suggests it might be more so in the future depending on how things go.
Last time I tried lemmy was maybe about a year ago, and to me it just seemed empty and desolate then. Maybe I just didn't know the right places to look. Really I was looking for something to replace reddit, and the way I used reddit was to just ignore the algorithm and the front page and look at only my feed sorted by new of various strange and interesting little subs. There are still very few of those around here compared to the breadth of them that used to exist on reddit. Most of those are dying or dead as the more interesting people that sustained them gradually realize the site owners are indifferent or hostile to their existence and they move on to one place or another. I don't go back there any more. But Lemmy doesn't seem to have a big enough userbase to sustain a c/baduk all that well yet, let alone a c/badukshitposting. So that's what I hope it does have some day, along with any better tools that prove necessary to protect us from the storm that doesn't look like it will end any time soon.