What kinds of things from reddit would you like to see Lemmy avoid as the user base grows?
Personally I think not having karma limits is nice currently! I understand why they were used but grinding karma as a lurker on reddit was frustrating.
They main instances have taken strong stances against nazi shit. The Lemmy developers are leftwing communists even, and they run lemmy.ml, so I don't think defederating from servers who'll platform nazis is unlikely.
Zero tolerance for fascists, and zero tolerance for state propagandists.
The fact that Lemmy is federated means you don't need to be tolerant of anyone and if they want to keep spewing bigotry and lies. If you make it impossible for them to exist in an instance they'll have to either give up or spool up their own instance that we can isolate.
Because running an instance requires some organization, maintenance, and money, anything that becomes too isolated from the rest of the fediverse will eventually die out.
Here admin has even more power, except it is limited to their own instance. So it is more on the user to be prepared. You don't want to be too attached to your data on a single instance. The instance might be abandoned, down, gone; the admin might go crazy. And the solution isn't to have the admin be more reasonable. The solution is to hedge your bets on multiple instances and multiple communities.
Reddit has a longstanding reputation for being a hive of scum and villainy (like hosting the_donald for years, or kotakuinaction, etc). I really hope that Lemmy keeps with the general left-leaning vibes of the fediverse overall, hopefully being a good space for queer people, women, people of colour, etc.
I think you do have to be careful here though. If you're too permissive you allow bigotry, but if you're too restrictive you cut off honest, good faith debate and create echo chamber silos where beliefs are never challenged.
Bigotry should never be accepted but that means non-discriminatory opinions, especially ones you disagree with, should be allowed.
Good faith is the key here. I'm all for disagreements leading to lengthy discussions and even some controversy as long as everyone is arguing in good faith.
I can't stand trolling, outright bigotry, and the normalization of literal fascist opinions as a mere "disagreement". If a "disagreement" (you know which ones I mean) will lead to people dying if enabled, I'm pretty happy keeping those ideas out.
The forced 'inside jokes' that filled so many threads, so many times you would see a post and be able to predict the top comment and its replies. Hoping that the lack of account karma helps with that.
Since Nazis took over a Bluey Memes (children's cartoon) Facebook page, I realized the only way to be rid of them is to have a zero tolerance for Nazis policy. Anything community purports "free speech" should be considered an immediate dog whistle for fascist creep.
Censorship. All the major subreddits became political echo-chambers. Reddit was founded on free speech and open discourse, especially when it was really uncomfortable. I'd love to see the same for Lemmy. Over the years I've seen authoritarianism creep into the moderation policies of most major subreddits. Today, even posting on the wrong subreddit is grounds for being banned from dozens of major subreddits. Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with "trans," is grounds for being banned.
No matter how politely stated your disagreement is, if it boils down to "I don't think I should have to respect trans people's identity"/"I don't think trans people should have rights" then it's transphobic and I'm 1000% fine with that being bannable
Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with “trans,” is grounds for being banned.
A subreddit I moderate, /r/moderatepolitics, has had to do a delicate balancing act around this. There are site-wide rules banning many statements around trans people, and the red lines are not well defined. Reddit's "Anti-Evil Operations" (site-wide moderation team) frequently swoops in and deletes comments that are offensive to trans people, but well within current political discourse in the US. That has undermined our mission of being a forum for diverse voices to hold productive but difficult discussions. At a certain point, we entirely banned the discussion of trans issues because one side was able to speak freely and the other side was walking on egg shells. I'm solidly pro-trans, but that's no way to have a conversation.
This likely was done to try to keep Reddit from becoming a cesspool like the "free speech" sites like Gab, but it has turned out to be a lazy way that short circuits necessary conversations.
There is only one necessary converation around trans people, in which trans people say, Let us exist without being harassed or persecuted, and everyone else says, OK. Anything else is just allowing bigots a platform.
Turns out when people complain about being censored and "free speech" it's because they got in trouble for not being able to call people the N word or becasue they want to "politely discuss" why certain people shouldn't be allowed to exist.
As a new community we need to identify and stamp out bad actors immediately and thoroughly (spammers, selfservers, ads disguised as posts, brigading, illegal content, racism, you get the idea).
We can't control if they create their own instances, but we can isolate them.
this seems to be a good place to mention avoiding groupthink and trendy opinions. more fresh diverisity and bold independent thinkers.
a flood of general americans would be worse than cultivating a niche counterculture initial userbase.
Getting banned in one subreddit you never participated in for daring to have a comment (regardless of the content of that comment) in another subreddit.
A relatively small thing: the 500-comment viewing limit for normal accounts. So many times on Reddit I've been put off engaging with posts with 500+ comments knowing that nobody would see it. It's stupid because comments are just text and unless the software design is absolutely terrible then simple text comments shouldn't take up bandwidth at all.
the 500 comment limit made the concept of daily threads replacing common questions a killer on subs like r/fitness. "Has this question been asked before? Well, instead of being able to pull up several threads about this topic, I have to go through the daily threads of hundreds of days and search the comments for keywords - after increasing the number of comments visible from 200 to 500, and then still not being able to search all the comments on the 1000+ comment threads." Just genuinely became unusable.