I have tried many forum-styled site over the years including the politically more questionable ones, and from what I see theres 3 hurdles a site need to pass in order to be good:
it needs good infrastructure, especially user interface (where 4ch, most forum, and now reddit fail)
it has some gatekeeping to filter out the "order consumers", but not too much that it drives user away, including having a toxic environment (where 4ch and .win fail)
it needs to have enough user generated content so thay theres actually reasons to use the site (whre most reddit clones fail)
from what I see lemmy has passed all the hurdles, and I have good hope the fediverse will stick around
In a community, whether if it’s online or your local club or just society in general, it requires admin/moderator/judges/law enforcement etc. to put in hard work to create rules and order so everything function smoothly. In a sense, the “order” they create here can be treated as a commodity.
A user can do things that helps out the moderators and create order (e.g. taxes, volunteering), or break rules and cause chaos, which “consumes” order (e.g. criminal activity, riots, trolling etc.) . Order consumers refers to people who consumes more order than they create.