There is no digital community that can do better than my living room. When adults meet face to face in someone’s home, there is an automatic degree of dignity and respect established even when there are opposing views.
The fedi is on some extreme push to promote mass migration by folks in places like Facebook. It’s a kind of braindead paradigm to just grow without strategy. If your livingroom has culture of a couple dozen progressive freedom fighters who run free software and value things like privacy and human rights, all is good until you open the door to thousands of random normies. They flood in with shitty values and fuckup your missions by dilluting the rich culture that was there.
It is not smart to just cattle-herd masses into the fedi and think your work is done. The mess is just brought to our doorstep. Then what? Consider [email protected]. It’s evident just from the voting that a large portion of readers inherently oppose the purpose of that forum. It’s ruined by adversaries because of open access to all while simultaneously coupled with ad hoc concealed voting (you can only see who downvotes if you run an instance).
In principle, we would still need an ETS outreach type of community which is open to all. But then we need a separate invite-only ETS community where we can cherry pick constructive accounts. Just as I would never approach someone wearing a MAGA hat and invite them into my living room, I would not invite an ETS-hostile account into an ETS activism/cult forum. The outreach venue would be used as a recruiting area from which we separate the riff raff from the favorable accts.
With no tooling changes, the only way to pull this off would be for the mod to selfhost, defederate from all, then invite people to register. It’s high effort for the organiser and the participants, it excludes non-self-hosters, and it’s overly isolated.
Lemmy needs to evolve more to solve this.
Funny enough, the apps here are the identical same as were available for Reddit. Like Boost that so famously was rate-limited by Steve Huffman. But they in turn only wanted to spend so much time in development of the app until (1) the Lemmy codebase itself supported options on the back-end, and (2) the number of people actually using their tools made their efforts feel worthwhile. Why spend an additional 20 hours a week on top of your regular job making features that only a few tens of people will ever use, in an app that only a few hundred ever download, on a platform of mere thousands (the vast majority of which may be either bots or definitely at least alts, some trying to get around bans but all representing the same smaller subset of people irl).
It is a chicken and egg problem wherein Lemmy would have to develop the software enough to make using apps worthwhile first before app devs would bother, and then most users demand apps before becoming willing to make content posts. Except then the Rexodus happened, and all those apps came in basically for free, along with a huge userbase of tens of thousands of people, and the flood of content with it.
An experiment that has partially failed. Lemmy’s peak userbase was ~55k after the Rexodus, but now despite how much worse Reddit continues to make itself (it’s more complex than I said before: Reddit allows for transparency in those few respects, but the culture of current mods choosing to use those options that are available to them is a different matter entirely - after all why would “landed gentry”, as spez called them, bother?), Lemmy’s active userbase has fallen down down down down and down again (stats), and looks like it will never rise even back to that former peak again. Hopefully I am wrong - maybe when Reddit finally kills off old-reddit for good it will happen, but I highly doubt it. That thought terms of the “This will finally be the year of the Linux desktop!” type of wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, PieFed is digging deep into the systemic things that were holding back and replacing all of it with code that actually can be developed quickly (as this past year has proven empirically), essentially restarting the whole project. Which tbf Kbin (now Mbin) also tried, but that project has only ever had ~2k users worldwide, compared to Lemmy’s 30-60k, a large fraction of which PieFed stands to inherit when people get tired of hearing of all the wonderful things that PieFed offers to them, whereas Lemmy is stuck in its rut and increasingly looks like it never will for some matters, and for other matters they will still trickle out on the timescale of years to a decade rather than weeks to a year for Piefed.
Btw, PieFed now retains deleted posts. The portion that the OP first offered and then requested to be deleted is still gone, in respect to how OP owns their own content, but the discussions that ensued independently of the OP are now retained for anyone to continue to see afterwards. e.g. OP asks a question, many people offer answers in response, then OP deletes their question, which now no longer works to also delete all of the answers. PieFed is amazing! 🤩