The disinformation does not help. I recall Lemmy proponents saying that instances should not defederate from places such as Hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml until an updated version would come out with the ability of users to block an instance. Then we waited on that for like a year, and finally the feature came!

Except it was a lie - or at least least, on the spectrum it lay closer to a false statement than a true one. What a Lemmy user can block that way includes:

• communities located on those instances

But what a Lemmy user is not provided the ability to do includes:

• prevent all users from those instances from trolling in communities located on other instances
• prevent those users from sending you DMs
• preventing those DMs from sending you notifications

The latter point was added later - i.e. when the user-level "instance blocking" functionality was first rolled out the DMs did not trigger notifications, but those were re-added back. In this formulation, the so-called "blocked" users have far more power to harass than the victims of their harassment have to prevent that!!

In fairness, user-level blocking still exists, but that forces this situation where new, especially non-technical users are forced to learn the hard way that a comment reply in some community found via browsing All - such as ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net, which notably most 3rd-party apps do not show the community sidebar prior to someone replying to comments - and then subsequently block people one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one... continued ad nauseum, particularly as they keep creating alts to get around community bans. A fact which some of them are quite proud to announce.

In short, we are a Nazi bar, which is another name for the Intolerance Paradox, although in this case a more apt name would be a tankie bar.

I prefer not to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the non-technical normies who would otherwise love to come to a place such as this and serve their OC here to an audience that would absolutely love to receive it. Instead, I think it is more interesting to ask what we can do to make them feel more welcomed here. Defederations are one tool, community blocks are another especially if they are opt-out so placed by people who know but easily discarded for anyone who wants a more "free-speech" environment (e.g. 4chan). Although the latter are nowhere easily accessible, and overall the tools of Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, etc. are exceedingly lacking in transparency.

And also usability too - e.g. Redditors are used to not having a modlog, but they do have a modmail, and receive notifications upon a moderation event, and can continue discussions with a mod or one another (anyone who has a link actually) even after a mod has removed the post from a community. Also they are used to polls, user and post flairs, and multi-reddits, all of which they have to give up on order to move to Lemmy. Although PieFed has all of these btw. Then again, PieFed is now shipping out a feature that shadow-censors contributions from the most highly active users without disclosure of this fact, nor the ability of someone to find out in advance whether their contributions are likely to be discarded or not - even those users who may be on Lemmy or Mbin or nodeBB rather than having made the choice to make an account on PieFed. This is extremely opaque.

The Threadiverse is simply too complicated for a non-technical normie to want to bother with understanding all of these nuances - made all the more complicated when 3rd-party apps are brought into consideration, which may or may not have half the features that the underlying choice of back-end platform would allow. We are the Arch Linux of forum software, and most people prefer Windows. Which might be mostly okay, except that we keep bleeding users and I definitely do not see our current growth as being any kind of a sign of "health". Nor, I agree, would we want all Redditors to suddenly flock here either. Having been trained on enshittified platforms, it is no wonder why they behave as they do.

I would suggest training instances where more mainstream people could go, where the most controversial of trolls are kept out? Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip already do this, and iirc programming.dev too, but the blocks are leaky and we are now having to fight against having an existing reputation of being a tankie bar. Plus the tools themselves are simply objectively inferior (in the technical sense obviously) to what Reddit offers - e.g. we have no modmail to ask a mod team why someone's post was removed, even if they even manage to discover in the first place that a moderation event occurred; so instead someone would have to DM each and every mod in the listing in hopes of finding one that is even an active account, much less knowledgeable about why the event occurred, and also willing to explain (though tbf this aspect would persist even if there was a modmail).

Otoh, for a heavily technical user, one who is capable enough to install their own instance, the Threadiverse software offers unparalleled flexibility to have their own mini-Reddit with whatever community forums they wish to put into it. But even then, people are being driven away - see e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/55961762 - despite their ability to implement whatever defederations and other admin-level tools they wish. The Threadiverse will not grow, meaning that it will continue to shrink due to attrition, until it finds a better way to retain the people that are already here.