The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Yeah, Lemmy has the same fundamental flaws that reddit has: it’s anonymous, free and it allows bots to post freely. The more popular it becomes, the more it will resemble reddit.
But what can you do? Facebook isn’t anonymous, and it’s a bigger shithole than reddit. If you made people pay, then you wouldn’t get engagement, and in a site like this with such a wide variety of communities, without huge engagement content is sorely lacking. And how will anyone ever be able to control bots after the LLM revolution?
To a point, perhaps. There’s no need for the toxicity to come from both the top down as well as the bottom up like it did with reddit. I can’t imagine most lemmy instances hosting r/jailbait, r/fatpeoplehate, or keeping r/the_donald around for years after they helped organize a nazi rally.
I’m reassured by the open hostility toward bigotry I’ve seen on lemmy. I hope that in particular persists.
I’m firmly of the opinion that any community that welcomes bigots is truly welcoming only to bigots. Since it is possible to display monstrous inhumanity using only civil language, any moderation policy that focuses heavily on policing language while coddling bigots eventually boils down to a “don’t sass the nazis” policy, which was far too common on reddit. I hope lemmy does not go down that road.
I also hope that reddit levels of toxicity are not inevitable for any network with sufficient participation to make it a useful resource for niche subjects.
Imo quality engagement comes from quality moderating. Facebook has a lot of moderators but they don’t give a shit about community and their focus is purely monetization. Reddit used to care about community but we know how that went. Lemmy has a chance to get it right. But even if an instance fucks it up the platform is open and gives us options for other communities within the platform.