This is a transition period.

Reddit lost a lot of important contributors during its little krystalspez crackdown. The formula for a successful, self-propagating online community is: good moderation + posted content + interesting comments + lurkers = healthy community.

Reddit still maintains a lot of its heavy posters, but a lot of the interesting comment makers have drifted off... a lot of them moved here. The federated communities don't have the continuous churning content creators en masse yet, but they do have interesting comments coming from the people that are here.

Reddit is somewhat the opposite. The content creators are churning away, but the interesting comments are dying off. There is more content being created on Reddit, but the comment that you will quote, or think about all day, is now slightly more likely to be made in a federated thread.

So Reddit feels hollow, and out here feels growing but still light on content. I predict that prolific posters prefer pointed ripostes to their posting, and will work their way here. That will be great, but it will also drag along a lot of the problem children of reddit as well. That will put a huge burden on the moderation here, as well as start piling on those server fees. I predict in a year or two, we will face the choice of doing zany pledge drives to protect our larger servers, or face some forms of blatant monetization. Also we'll have to figure out how to avoid giving the hug of death to new federated servers with interesting content.

...and there will be hidden corporate shill servers trying to latch in. Another problem with federation we need to consider down the road.

But it's worth it. Capitalism will always try to exploit community, but community is an important human experience. If we can keep the leeches down to a minimum, we can build great things together, and help each other in a world that increasingly only offers what profits most. That type of community is what Reddit pretended to be, and it's what the Federated Communities can be.

Just a heads up, this is how early reddit was. People will argue that the larger the platform the more likely the community will deteriorate. I will argue that is partly true and does contribute to enshittification of social media, but I think the main factor is the corporate greedos trying to continuously increase profit. Reddit kept making new rules and policies that kept degrading the platform. They made a toxic environment where flaming and antagonistic content would be shown on people's feed.

Am I saying Lemmy isn't awesome? Not really. You guys can make that conclusion. But I have seen similar posts like this in the early days of reddit. Make do of this as you want. Ponder and ask what made reddit bad and if this is the path of lemmy or it is "naturally" immune to it.