The tools that Usenet had to maintain its culture were insufficient compared to the spam and the arrival of the rest of the net (today is the 10925th day of September 1993). Moderation was based on barrier to entry (see also the moderation tooling of alt.sysadmin.recovery) or limited federation (bofh restricted hierarchy).

Combine this with the… reduction of, let’s call it ‘deep computer literacy’ with the techies - moving away from the command line and to web browsers and guis. This allowed people to get much of the content of the emerging web while drying up people arriving on Usenet.

While myspace and geocities allowed for the regular person to establish a web presence, these also were centralized systems. The web as a “stand up and self host” is far beyond the technical literacy level of most people… and frankly, those who do know how to do it don’t because keeping your web server up to date with the latest security patches or dealing with someone who is able to do an RCE on your AWS instance and run up your credit card bill is decidedly “not fun.”

And so, instead of running individual forums, you’ve got Reddit. It means that you don’t have to have deep knowledge of system administration or even if you do, spend your days patching servers in order to host and interact with people in the internet.

---

So, today…

New software need to be turnkey and secure by default. Without this, instability of smaller instances will result in single large instances being the default. Consider Wordpress… and you’ve got a few large servers that run for the regular person and do automated software updates and patching because I’ve got no business anymore running a php application somewhere without spending time doing regular patching. When (not if) Lemmy has a RCE security issue (and not just the “can inject scripts into places” level of problems but rather underlying machine compromised) there will be a “who is staying up to date with the latest patches for Lemmy and the underlying OS?” day of reckoning.

Communities (not /c/ but people) need to be able to protect the culture that is established through sufficient moderation tooling. The moderation tooling on Reddit is ok and supplemented by the reddit admins being able to take deeper actions against the more egregious problem users. That level of moderation tooling isn’t yet present for the ownership level moderation of a /c/ nor at the user level being able to remove themselves from interactions with other individuals.

Culture needs to be as something that is rather than something that is not. This touches on A Group is its Own Worst Enemy ( https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf ) which I highly recommend. Pay attention to Three Things to Accept and Four Things to Design For. Having a culture of “this is not reddit, but everything we are doing is a clone of reddit” is ultimately self defeating as Conway’s Law works both ways and you’ll get reddit again… with all the problems of federation added in (the moderation one being important).

On that culture point, given federation it is even more important to establish a positive culture (though not toxic positivity has its own problems). The culture of discontents swearing because they can and there’s no moderation to say no or the equivalent of elder statesmen to establish and maintain a tone (tangent: very lightly moderated chat on a game I play has a distinctly different tone if the ‘elder statesmen’ of that particular section of the game are present and chatting or not… just being there and being reasonable and polite has the effect of discouraging trolls - its no fun to troll people who won’t get mad at you, and people seek to be as good as the elder statesmen of the channel).

So, as long as Lemmy is copying Reddit (and Mastodon is copying Twitter - though they’re doing a better job of not copying it now), and moderation isn’t solved, and the core group (read A Group) isn’t sufficiently empowered to set the tone. Without a sufficiently large user base to engage with (and be able to discover other places as appropriate if one /c/ isn’t to one’s liking), blocking users is less palatable and the seeing a larger percentage of messages being ones that you’d rather not interact with… you’d leave. If you sat down at the bar and the guy next to you is swearing every other word because they can and the bartender won’t throw them out - you leave and avoid going back to that bar. Same is true of social media. Mastodon has the advantage that your’e interacting with individuals rather than communities.

On reddit, on subs I moderate (yes, I’m still there), I’ve got auto mod set up to filter all vulgarity. I approve nearly all of it, but it has also let me catch problems that are getting heated in word choice… and I can say “nope”, delete the comments (all the way down to the root) that are setting the wrong tone for the sub. And I’ve only had to do that twice in the past year.

So… there’s my big point. The rate of new people joining has to be equal to or greater than the people who leave because of cultural or technical reasons. Technical reasons are fixed by fixing the software. Cultural ones are done by giving the tools for moderation. And if a given community starts causing evaporation of people because local or all on an instance becomes not something that you’d enjoy seeing, the culture of the admins needs to be sufficiently empowered to boot it. The ideal of “anything as long as it isn’t illegal - we don’t censor anything” often results in a culture of the site that isn’t enjoyable to be part of. A ‘dangerous’ part of the fediverse is that that culture can spread to other instances much more easily.

… And that’s probably enough rambling now. Make sure you read A Group is its Own Worst Enemy though. While it was something from nearly two decades ago - the things that it talks of are timeless and should not be forgotten when designing social software.