If Lemmy stays just niche enough to keep the hoardes of angry internet users away, I think we might just have a goldmine.

Reddit didn't always use to be such a cesspool of hate. I think as things grow and attract the masses, they attract the type of people that are only on the internet to be driven by their emotions. The up/downvote system solidifies that too.

My thinking is that you can have a campfire with 20 people around it and still have meaningful conversations. Put 1000 around that same campfire and shit will go sideways.

I think the old forums had it right and I hope we can see that persist here. Don't need karma or algorithms to surface content, just mid-size/smaller communities and good moderation.

I'm mainly lemmy.world right now and have a few federated subscriptions, but I imagine at some point I'll branch out and spend more time on the local feed of some other instance because I'll be chasing that mid-size population.

I wonder if the increase of porn will affect this. From past experiences I got the impression the people and/or the way they communicate changes when it becomes a platform to search for fapping material. Either because it attracts a different type of person or because it changes interaction between users.