I have virtually given up on having "logical" conversations on Lemmy. Admiral Patrick and you represent roughly half of the list of people that I still trust that I can do that with. The amount of "witch hunting" and "purity testing" - as the meme goes - is too damn high!!!

I can agree with someone 99% of the way, but if I forget myself and say just ONE thing different - like I prefer Unix but not Linux, or maybe Linux but not Arch? - then it's all APOSTASY!!!

I cannot remember the last time that I downvoted someone. But people were even downvoting Admiral Patrick (the dev of Tesseract) for posting his goodbye message - get this - in his own community, housed on his own instance. I commented there in an Edit, how on earth is that kind of message "less relevant" (the purpose behind a downvote) in such a community?

When I look around, I mostly see just kids vomiting up their emotions. Which... I shitpost too damnit! But I also like to close the door and have a place to have a more sedate discussion with people who are interested and have actually thought for one second about a topic prior to speaking. It is not that I am against the PRESENCE of the former, but rather than I am adamant that the ABSENCE of even so much as the capability to allow for the latter that is killing Lemmy, day by day.

But that's less of a "Reddit" problem imho and more of a "Lemmy was made by authoritarian devs who prefer to admin their own instance the the desires of the rest of the world to use the software differently than that are kinda their own problem, not that of the devs?" Which makes perfect sense. And encourages me leave Lemmy.

Which I did - PieFed is fantastic:-). Although a lot of the "content" is still on Lemmy, and thus subject to Lemmy moderation rules, which involve a ton of human volunteer curation effort, even as the mod gets spit upon for not being pure enough.

I too think that karma can be useful if done sparingly - e.g. if someone has "enough" karma to post in certain, more thoughtful communities, but beyond that threshold count it means nothing. Much like there are rooms for toddlers to play in, rooms for adolescents, and ostensibly rooms for "adults" as well... although when kids are allowed to enter and scream as loud as they can to their hearts content, doesn't it REALLY become a room for kids, or at least mixed ages? The threshold limiter is the only thing I can think of that would allow for it to be quiet. Either that or kick the loudest, screamiest (hehe that's not a word as we both know:-P) kid out after they've already screamed... except we do not do that, and this place allowing for total anonymity means that they simply slip right back in nearly instantly after being kicked out. Which is why Admiral Patrick said that he left: as lemm.ee shut down, all the trolls went elsewhere and somehow forgot to helpfully label themselves with the same account name as they had on lemm.ee, forcing him to have to start all over again... or just leave the Threadiverse entirely:-(.

Yes, Lemmy is Reddit 2.0, somehow even more authoritarian than even Reddit was. Like we've replaced spez with dessalines: instead of one person saying what we can and cannot criticize we have someone else disallowing any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea... tbf we also have our choice of other admins as well, or if we are willing to pay the electricity, network traffic, time, skill, and attention costs (especially for being mindful of CSAM attacks), ourselves, but the latter seem to be very few, especially as the Threadiverse grows in size and scope and traffic.

PieFed solves much of that, but it is still new and so trades one set of problems with a different set.

Why aren't people trying to do something about it? Because there is only so much that mods and even admins CAN do, while still on the Lemmy software. People kept waiting for a better replacement: Kbin.social provided a strong hope but then it died, and Mbin another but it seems to have stalled and is not everyone's cup of tea, then there was Sublinks that seemed to offer promise but it too stalled as the dev had a baby - see e.g. this post where the admins of Lemmy.World expressed strong hope in it. And now finally we have PieFed, which finally FULFILLS all of those hopes and dreams!! Maybe. At least it exists, and it has tons of features, and so now also piefed.world has been created as well, as a test. So... perhaps this will open up what you are talking about?

It will take effort though: mods will have to learn how to set up and use the automated tools. I imagine therefore that a few mods will end up automating the moderation of many many communities at once, even more so than on Lemmy. But once it is automated... it can scale as large as desired?

But "Lemmy" itself does not care about growing, as you have already seen. Pop over to lemmy.ml and look at some of the conversations happening on Local: they want to remain their echo chamber, disconnected from centrists from the Western world? (edit: there are oh so many spelling mistakes in this comment, but I am going to ignore all of those and yet still want to clarify this one point: I know you are a leftist, and at one point I thought I was too, but compared to the likes of hexbear and lemmygrad.ml and even lemmy.ml we are flaming right-wingers, I believe? if you [checks notes] "have a bank account", then you aren't leftist enough for them). Which is fine - we'll go make our own spaces, as we have already started and are in the process of doing just this past month, especially as lemm.ee went down and many MANY communities migrated not to another Lemmy server but to a PieFed one, plus several new ones were created. Speaking of brace yourself, but a good third or more of Lemmy traffic might also shift over to PieFed, especially if Lemmy.World decides to shut down, like if the admins prefer to keep their focus on only one piece of software, and the mods give up having to deal with all the toxicity without having access to the automated tools (as Admiral Patrick finally did). But more likely it will be a graduated shift, punctuated by fits and starts in response to various stimuli.

The answer remains the same as always: if you build it they will come (and conversely you HAVE to build it or else they will not), but the interpretation of that hits differently after this past month of migrations to PieFed, because the pace of that building process seems to have quickened! (or in reality it merely has entered a phase where the growth is more visible to us using common metrics, such as Monthly Active Users, rather than more intangible ones such as GitHub commits of a variety of software features)