Here are my two cents as an outsider looking in. I spend ~15-30 mins a day on Lemmy (usually while doing other things), so I see a decent amount of content but I am not at the leading edge of posts. When I look at posts, I rarely, if ever see spam. For the most part there is civil conversations and those that attempt to derail them are downvoted and, in some cases, banned.

Does this mean that moderation isn't a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue. Personally I would like to see you guys refederate, as that could only increase the quality of discussions throughout the fediverse.

I spend most of the time on Kbin, sometimes lurking and sometimes commenting on different posts.

I can't talk about sh.itjust.works because I rarely see content from that instance. Sometimes a meme, or sometimes a techie news post. But very rarely, as I said. If you stay federated or defederated with sh.itjust.works, I don't really care, because I don't really know that place or the content it's published there.

However, I strongly prefer to stay defederated from lemmy.world. I really can't understand why an instance with the .world domain is so US-centric. I don't give a shit about Iowa, Idaho, Florida, Montana, Texas, California or whatever posts from related communites I see while browsing all on Kbin. Besides, being myself anti-nazi, anti-fascist and anti-tankie, I support when other instances defederate from far-right and far-left instances, but I don't understand why they defederate instantly from certain instances and take some time to defederate from other certain instances. It's sad, but lemmy.world is the most similar thing to reddit right now, and it seems that they want to monopolize everything, because there are communities on other instances, as well as on Kbin, that have few activity, if any, in favour of .world ones.

And then there is a cryptic reply to a comment I made on another post.

Given how unstable Lemmy's performance is, adding even more incoming activity is likely to cause more crashes and problems. And it isn't as if there are aren't 1200 other Lemmy instances out there who are showing content from Lemmy.world

I remember when Beehaw's signup code in Lemmy was so broken that there was a huge backlog.

It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot,

That's helped with the crashes in recent weeks, less data, less crashing. Lemmy.world has over 9000 communities, moderating all those entrances is huge, and the SQL performance problems in Lemmy are aggravated by all that additional data.