Agreed about FiniteBanjo but iirc that definitely was not the only one - and it makes sense that a mod would rather ban some singular individual (especially if only for a day or two) rather than lock an entire post over such. Reddit offers the ability to lock a particular thread within a post (including I believe replies underneath it?), but I forget if that is possible in Lemmy or not. The tools tend to be significantly more primitive here, even if not enshittified for reasons of profit, just shit instead for reasons of not enough effort put in as compared to a multi-million dollar corporation hiring full teams of dedicated programmers. And then add the constraints of requiring working within the ActivityPub Protocol to enact federation and it becomes clear how much more difficult this task is to not merely replace Reddit but expand beyond it.

Though the end users rarely seem to care about such things and instead simply want everything handed to them for free. That is what they were trained into becoming by an advertising driven model of the internet, and they see no reason to be anything else.

About the death threats; I never said that the threat was personal and direct. And actually I had forgotten about whatever accusations were faked or whatever, though that’s besides the point for my own topic here. Vague and unspecified death threats are still calls for literal violence and portrayals of a lawless mindset that encourages such. Which some of us here on the Threadiverse very much like, while others of us here are the opposite and merely tolerate it, but your average Redditor trends more towards having been groomed to enjoy the walled garden effect, or else has already been here. In any case I was pointing towards the death threats as evidence of disorder and fighting that leads away from stability, which in turn increases greatly the complexity of the Threadiverse that is mandatory to be understood prior to joining us here.

e.g. when/if the Flotilla defederates from Lemmy.world, that will impact a great many people. LW has >90% of the most active communities, and of the rest many have ended up via various migration effects on an instance that is a member of the Flotilla. New members will in virtually no way be guided into understanding any of this, leading to such posts as e.g. the recent one in Fediverse expressing absolute shock at having been banned from Lemmy.ml - as if that wasn’t a practically daily event here (or at least definitely would be if we had a sufficient populace to keep up that rate). We are fast falling into fragmentation, since we cannot maintain mutual respect. And especially if evidence really was being outright faked (I have no idea?), then all the more so.

I am not trying to suggest that such an action would signal the death knell for Lemmy, but the fact that it seemed imminent at one point and in fact is still high likely does not exactly signal health either, particularly in terms of a mindset of growth as opposed to mere existence.

I also am not opposed to decentralization, particularly since that’s already what we have now, but we should somewhere EXPLAIN this to new joiners. Although many years into this project, I haven’t really seen even the first steps towards such a thing. The PieFed instance selector came the closest to it and even sparked in me a hope that it would meet that need, but progress on that seems to have been abandoned and suggestions for PieFed to improve it have gone ignored for something like a year or so now. I doubt it will ever be carried forward, in that venue.

Agreed about the swimming pool illustration regarding onboarding, except it’s far worse than that even: we here all learned GENTLY as the waters slowly rise about us, so we each picked up a few new concepts as the years trickled (or sped?) past us. New joiners are being asked to suddenly learn all of it at once, and even worse than that besides, to do so prior to making an account. One example: if you visit Lemmy.ml without an account you will see a Local listing of posts, which I believe is the software default for all newly created instances. Potential new joiners are not shown what is possible from observing that instance, unless they poke around sufficiently enough to notice the All button and see federated content as well. Another example is that I know of no possible way to view an instance’s set of rules from within Voyager. That entire sidebar might as well not exist for people using Voyager, which unfortunately also seems the most likely scenario for a new joiner coming here from Reddit?

I don’t like questionaires, but something along the lines of the PieFed instance picker where the information is all laid out, filtering is possible based on it, and sentences explain the various choices possible would be a great way forward, if someone were willing to take up that project.