It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
This doesn’t work too well in practice though, as we saw on reddit. If a new user looks for a subreddit about knives, 9 times out of 10 they will find r/knives and if it’s decently active they’ll never learn about r/knife. The name squatters have a massive advantage over the alternatives based on that alone.
Granted, the instance based community system has a similar problem where the communities on the biggest instances will have an advantage in attracting new users. But it’s a lot easier to overturn because you don’t have to use a janky alternative name, and you can easily publicize poor moderation and dissent on other servers.
Without the alternative server component, holding control over certain community names is way too powerful, and over time results in a significant degradation of the usability of the site, as it becomes harder and harder to find the actual well-moderated communities. Using alternative names doesn’t solve the problem, it just provides a temporary workaround. Federation actually solves the problem in the long term.
There is definitely room for improvement on the modlog. But also moderators and admins can view the full removed comment and media, so it’s not like that’s impossible. It’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, that’s for sure.