Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They've cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I'm sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.
Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.
Lemmy doesn't need to be #1 in popularity. I'd prefer it to split and maintain a higher level of quality, even if it's smaller as a result. Even if Meta can grab data either way, it should be disconnected on principle.
Separating the two sounds like it would make the problem a lot worse. Nobody would have a reason to create smaller duplicate communities anymore so things would end up centralised and easier to abuse, like what happened with Reddit. You could hop your account to a new instance, but doing so means nothing if there's only one instance of the community.
I'm new to lemmy so I might be wrong on this, but say if we have one big community for a certain hobby/interest and the moderators get power trippy or there are other problems, people into that hobby essentially have nowhere to go right? Having lots of smaller places and subscribing to them all makes it easier to cut one out and be less reliant on a specific group of people.
A lot of communities these days have moved over to Discord too, meaning information isn't archived or easy to access months/years later. There have been cases of accounts being compromised or rogue mods causing trouble, and in a few seconds a server's chat history and all associated info/guides/artwork etc are lost in seconds. I'd love to see a return to forums.
IMO it doesn't need to replace Reddit for everyone or grow to be a direct competitor. As long as there are enough users to keep communities active and discussions going, it's a nice alternative for people who want to get away from Reddit or other social media sites. I like that threads are active for longer than a few hours before dropping off, and since posts are slower I don't find myself mindlessly scrolling. Lemmy feels more like a mid 2000s forum but with better usability.
I've been interested in picking one up in the sale, but between the controls and newer games having high CPU demands, it seems like a stretch to get a comfortable experience in handheld. Something with either built-in controller support, a slower pace or a good community layout would be perfect.
