Less than moderation, my biggest problem with e.g. Reddit is that Reddit isn't one destination, it's a million. I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits much more than the site itself. Each one of those has its own separate network effect.

The biggest shot Lemmy has is that Reddit is taking every possible step to drive users away - just today I had to install another block rule because I started getting obtrusive overlays to drive me to the mobile app even when browsing it logged in on my desktop.

But even then, the fact that so many of us are willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep using Reddit for various subreddits even as the site gets worse and worse shows just how sticky the network effect of the existing communities is.

I've been in some of them for nearly two decades, and finding a community with the same topic elsewhere won't reproduce the set of people.

I think it's a simpler problem: the general public these days uses the internet from phones, not computers with actual keyboards. Phones just discourage longform text and nuance, and encourage 180-character quips and video and image posts. Even if you had a well-moderated forum that kept trolls and bots at bay, the average quality of posts is going to be poor compared to a decade-plus ago. No one yet fully perceived that shift back when Reddit alternatives were first proposed.

Also an entire generation has now been raised ignorant of the concept of a FAQ, because commercial platforms like Reddit wanted people asking the same basic questions over and over again, it was good for engagement metrics. Try to moderate a forum today and close posts covered by a FAQ, and you'll just get young people calling you an overzealous moderator and leaving, because your perspective is unintelligible to them.

This exactly. It's always confusing to me when people realize that [current centralized platform] is bad, and their solution to that is [new centralized platform everybody moves to]. None of these systems can work.

As soon as they reach a size where they become actually interesting to use, they also reach a size where they become interesting targets for attackers.

I'm moderating r/Oberon for some months now and it is no effort at all. If there were bots, they didn't stand out in a negative way.

If there's hope, it's that Reddit/Twitter/etc now function as a quarantine or flypaper for the eternal September, the bots, the scammers, the slop, etc. And newer sites/networks can flourish at a smaller size because there's not enough profit in targeting them.