Title. Alt account cause obviously.
Been on lemmy for like 2 years, at first it was okay, possibly because I started on lemm.ee (RIP), possibly the influx of new users from reddit has changed things, who knows.
But now I keep seeing all the same things happen here that happened on reddit. People abusing rules that go unenforced, mods removing posts/banning users only when they take offense, users (and even mods) fighting each other over instances like rival gangs, communities propped up by single users, all of it.
The only actual differences I’ve found are that there’s no ads, and some instances have a more gated sign-up process to deter bots/spammers. That’s it.
There are some good faith users of course, but it seems the vast majority just want to be in a safe space echo chamber and talk shit about each other. It’s like that meme from the office: corporate needs you to differentiate these images, and one is reddit and the other is reddit wearing a lemmy mask, they’re the same image.
People are people, manage your expectations accordingly.
These kinds of federated services were never meant to be better than reddit in a content sense, all they do is provide a system in which the possibility of a subjectively better platform was possible.
More simply, federated services are about federation/decentralisation.
The idiomatic solution to the problem you’re describing is either to:
start your own federated instance, with the prerequisite amount of hookers and blackjack, but also sufficient rules and moderational enforcement to adhere to your expectations of what a better reddit looks like.
or
find an instance that already does this and join it.
This is a thing that is possible in a federated service, which is the actual difference between reddit and lemmy/piefed etc