This place (Lemmy) reminds me a lot of when I used to post on SA back before Reddit was popular. I wouldn’t call it “small” per se, but you actually knew who the moderators were. And since there was no upvote/downvote system, it was a lot more casual and people didn’t feel the need to try to tailor their posts to get upvoted.
Of course, it was also a dumpster fire sometimes too, and just like Reddit, the guy running it was a jerk. But I do miss it sometimes.
There’s dozens of us that are (or were) protected, it seems! Seriously, it was a great forum and it’s still pretty good. It was legendary for the memes before they were called that, and the Photoshop Phridays were hilarious. I don’t post much but you can still find some good discussions there, some of the subforums are still pretty big and active.