Communities are driven first by the people that join them, then who sticks around. In a setup like this, where anyone can drive by comment from any old instance, you’re going to need to ban abusive people or the good users will leave. /r/newzealand had a solid set of rules and for the most part they were consistently applied.

https://god.dailydot.com/bartender-kicks-out-tweets someone linked the nazi bar story the other day, Twitter is fucked for me atm so I can’t link the original. Either way, if you don’t kick out the shitheads straight away then they become your userbase, and the kicking out has to come from the mods in Lemmy. Downvotes don’t do anything here.