So structurally I don’t have an answer other than I know that what reddit became is a cancer. Structurally lemmy should find ways to counter commercialization

By design it already has done this via having no specific singular owner being able to control it.

. One way is to avoid boxes. Communities should be more random and chaotic.

I feel like this up to community owners. You can't make people run communities how they don't want to to bring about a specific vibe you want.

I also would push to the mods should take a back seat and give back control to communities to upvote and downvotes content they do not want to see.

This has the potential to make many communities complete rubbish. I will use a Reddit example. Take r/metal. Without any moderation, the community would be nothing but nothing but posts of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, etc forever. Because people just upvote music they already know, all the highly popular artists are always upvoted by people who pass by the subreddit. The moderators, in conjunction with the community implemented a popular artist blacklist (voted on in threads and updated every quarter) to stop that and provide much better coverage for lesser-known bands making it a much more valuable, less low-effort community. That's just one example I can immediately appeal to here.

Without curation, many communities would degrade over time and become slop.