You mean the basic premise of the internet?

The internet solved these problems a long time ago by the basic network of relatively small communities being uninteresting targets. The modern internet broke everything by centralizing it all and inserting themselves in the middle to monetize. It added another layer to the OSI network model. The centralized corporate social media layer.

They broke it and sold you the solutions to problems they caused.

The core premise of reddit and Digg was that the people would decide by voting. We've seen ample evidence by now that this model doesn't work. Yet lemmy is based on it. The saving grace might be federation. In other words the model you mentioned. In other words the internet.

Vetting used to happen by persistent usernames that are known to be real life average people, with no apparent ulterior motives. Some social media sites like reddit killed that by making throwaway accounts common. Other social media sites made being a known user too dangerous due to popularity. Which reddit has fallen into now.

Getting too popular means they might have sold out by becoming an "influencer". It also means putting themselves in personal danger due to the psychos out there who would threaten their personal safety. Which drives away good users, leaving only the opportunists. We've been settling in a mix of both. A conveyor belt of pseudonyms that are basically farmed bot accounts for shilling, made to look trustworthy enough.

The Digg/reddit vote model was a solution to a problem that didn't exist. The problem it was really trying to solve was monetization. Digg tried to monetize and failed. Reddit tried for decades to monetize and it finally succeeded. Look what a piece of shit it is.

It's often talked about how to grow lemmy like other big social media. Maybe it doesn't need to. That brings problems of the big social media sites.

Something nobody ever mentions when reminiscing about the old internet is how slow and small forums were. There would be handful of new comments each day. Maybe a new thread or two. You check it once or twice a day, and then went outside. Nobody infinite scrolled the old forums. Nobody cared that there wasn't enough content. If somebody had something to post, they posted. Otherwise they didn't. No problem.

If one forum wasn't interesting enough. Then you went to others. If they all had nothing going on then you stopped looking at the internet.

You establish trust the same way humans have since the dawn of history. Trust in a person and their wares is established by being a known poster with good history of being there to post when they had something meaningful to say. The guy shoveling his wares 24/7 is out for one thing. It's the make money off you, or impose their opinions on people.

Tech companies reinvent solutions to these things while disguising monetization schemes. We already had the solutions. Nobody uses those anymore.

What we have now is a techbro libertarian hellhole they like to call zero trust society or whatever. So everyone operates under the premise that these problems they caused are solved by pure technology. Deposit your cryptocurrency now to obtain one unit of Trust(TM). Here is your Trusted(TM), not sponsored, non-affiliated content (terms and conditions apply). Don't forget my fees for facilitating this exchange of Trust(TM). Thank for your patronage.

So you'll hyper focus on being a watcher of the watchers until you get overwhelmed by the task and burnout whereupon you'll be completely absent from the post and the watchers will have no one watching them anymore because you'll be in bed staring between your phone and the ceiling and you'll occasionally get out of bed to use the washroom and open your fridge for something to eat but then remember that you haven't restocked on anything and close the fridge door and go back to bed with a glass of water at least and lament the fact that you are no longer doing the thing you said you would do and you'll ruminate about that for several hours until you pull up your phone again because enough time has gone by now that the social media feeds are somewhat fresh again and you're only seeing a handful of stale posts in your feed that you already upvoted but there's enough new content to keep you scrolling until that gets old so you start looking for something to stream to take your mind off the fact that you're no longer watching the watchers which would be fine but there's nothing good enough for you to actually click play on something so you keep scrolling until the app actually stops giving you suggestions which makes you panic for a second because how pathetic is it that you actually scrolled so much that the app isn't suggesting anything so you end up clicking on The Office for the hundredth time and pick up where you left off the last time you burntout which is the episode where Kevin brings the chili to work and it makes you breath slightly heavier out of your nostrils and it's just enough dopamine to keep you going for a bit longer.

I for one welcome our new ADHD overlord.