A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation. Many people were banned from Reddit for many reasons, among them including an extreme level of toxicity, so the need for such is dire - that is, assuming that our goal is not to provide a safe space for everyone to vent their feelings, and instead to offer a space welcoming to newcomers. The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

So (1) we need to identify what we are. Some places, like dbzero and anarchist nexus will choose to become more like 4chan, with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances. Others, like PieFed.Social, will become more actively hostile against such trolling and tankie (and tankie-supporting) behaviors. So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

The problem here comes from lack of transparency. Hexbear's Chapotraphouse is fairly open about what it is... though many 3rd-party apps bury the sidebar quote deep into their menus, especially if you encounter a post on All and so you will basically never see it. I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label, so that non-extremist mainstream normal folks do not encounter them unawares, and by virtue of their inclusion and lack of distinction from any other content here, think that the entire Threadiverse is a tankie haven, full of extremists who support genocide and the violent, bloody overthrow of the entire Western civilization.

PieFed made huge strides towards this regard. Most 3rd-party apps barely support any PieFed features that differ from base Lemmy, but at least the browser UX is somewhat better, in some ways.

However, PieFed advancement in this regard seems to have ground to a halt before picking up speed in the opposite direction. But to focus on the former for a moment, e.g. the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance. Fortunately PyLova has picked up the slack here and advanced that cause significantly forward. Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact. However, I see no acknowledgement of that fact at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser, where for PieFed.Social the closest item of explanation offered seems to be "Newbie friendly: yes".

Only after someone has been guided into picking an instance does the futher steps matter, like (2) picking a 3rd-party app (sigh... I guess to most Redditors, this is mandatory?), and (3) helping them sign up to discover new content (this PieFed excels at, at least at the software level even though many instances like PieFed.World do not take full advantage by fleshing out the Topic Areas). Though then comes (4) retaining people, which is where most of our exceedingly poor reputation seems to stem from, as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole, which simultaneously barely has any content and yet what content it does offer to people unfortunately turns people away due to how toxic it all is. I do think that Rimu had the right idea behind a lot of his social credit features - e.g. if someone is extremely often downvoted, by let's say "like-minded" instances (however that might be defined - e.g. it could be anti-genocide, or it could even be the opposite of pro-genocide, or neutral, or whatever), then their account name begins to come with a warning ⚠️ label, so that people do not stumble into a conversation completely unawares. Not everyone wants this space to be even more like 4chan than it already is - some do, but mainstream normal folks have spoken, and they refuse to come here because it is already too much like it for their tastes.

People demand freedom. Which ultimately means some restrictions must be placed, so as to protect others, e.g. people must not be free to say whatever they want, even against the wishes of the recipients, or else we have no freedom here at all. Voat & nostr already proved that: even the spaces that reputedly values "free speech" the most ended up as wastelands where nobody wanted to venture into, due to having no freedom to not listen to such vitriol literally 100% of the time (without any recourse to block it even for a moment, except to flee entirely).

So now it's a cache-22 where we won't get more content without more people, who refuse to come here. And also they demand 3rd-party apps, whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed. PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We'll see what happens!