Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.
:pawoo: Announcement!
Thank you for always using Pawoo.
Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator.
Thank you very much for your cooperation.
The nature of a site like reddit (and lemmy and all other alternatives) means a large userbase is necessary. Not at the expense of CSAM, but also everyone trying to gatekeep lemmy doesn't realise that we'll die a slow death unless the fediverse grows by at least 10-20x.
I swear, Lemmy users act like they are completely in favor of an instance of 40 users and a submission every other week. Seeing scale as inherently bad.
Lemmy will fucking roll over and die within the year.
Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It's just pure incompetence and mismanagement.