It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
Lemmy has language tags. Clients could offer integration with translation tools.
I don’t know how big the “wave” is but !buyeuropean@feddit.uk has jumped to the 11th(?) most popular/active community in the last week or so. The activity level reminds me of more niche subreddits, where you’d see a couple posts every hour through the day. Quite an increase over what it was at.
I also recall seeing a chart of a German (?) instance that had linear growth and over the past week it went exponential. I doubt the exponential growth will last more than a couple weeks before going back to linear, but still cool to see.
Edit: Added link to the community.