Agreed about FiniteBanjo but iirc that definitely was not the only one ...

So, I looked at the post without being logged in and I see your point. It seems I have blocked a fair share of contentious people. FiniteBanjo appears to be the only one that hasn't warranted a block. My mistake for not checking an unfiltered version of the post. Appreciate the correction :)

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.

That sounds like a pretty cool feature. I don't link I've ever seen it implemented in the threadiverse though.

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.

Yeah, we're definitely on the slower road :/

... LW has >90% of the most active communities ...

Do you have a source? Not trying to disagree, genuinely curious to look at the data. Activity Data puts Lemmy.world users originating/creating less than a 1/3 of total activity. So, it'd be interesting if everyone goes to lemmy.world communities. I know Mia's Community Growth Posts often have Lemmy.world communities with the most new subscribers, but I don't know if they have the most "active" communities by total number (posts, comments, visiting users).

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).

Yeah, better/any on-boarding is really needed.

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 would actually go the other way and say things have calmed way down compared to like a year ago. I really thought the threadiverse was going to split during the false evidence against the anarchists and .world admin calls to de-federate. It seems, to me, that everyone has taken a step back and mostly just stays out of each other's way now, which isn't getting along, but doesn't appear to be actively antagonistic.

I think, even if it did split, it wouldn't be a unified split. All the "non-aligned" instances (not neo-liberal, not ml, not anarchist) is like 50% of the threadiverse and they would still see everything. So, I expect the "non-aligned" instances would increase in size and the "aligned" instances would decrease in size. Which is kind of what the data shows (all three "aligned" groups show decreases (anarchists the least) and "non-aligned" increasing on average).

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, unfortunately not enough developers/admin/mods/supporters to go around at this point. I already have a number of my own projects that don't have enough time devoted to them, but I'm open to working on some on-boarding features/pitches with you, if you're interested.

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 agree about Voyager's inability to see the instance sidebar/set-of-rules. I made a post about it. We'll see what happens.