That’s true, I guess I was commenting more on the differences between the userbases. I’m not sure much can really be done about that in the short term. Lemmy is this way because it is small and is a sort of counterculture protest against mainstream social media. Until it grows and evolves out of that framing, its userbase will continue to look very different to reddit’s.
From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.
A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.
I guess it’s not really surprising, though. The Lemmy userbase is much smaller and very skewed towards certain types of people with extremely strong opinions and low levels of tolerance for anything that goes against their worldview. I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard, it just benefits from having such a massive userbase filled with all kinds of people. The toxicity and off-topic intrusions of political/culture war stuff get drowned out over there, whereas here you’ll frequently see threads where 90% of the comments are arguing about things that are completely irrelevant to the actual topic because so much of userbase has an activist mindset that is always itching for a fight.
Probably because if they were enabled it would be filled with people soapboxing about their irrelevant hobbyhorses or offering to help just to keep the instance alive. Neither are useful or relevant. If people wanted the instance to survive then they should have been volunteering months ago, not at 11:59 on the Doomsday Clock.
There always is. No one is getting paid to do this, they’re giving up their free time and (often) money. Leaving it to the last minute to volunteer or donate is never sustainable long-term. If people really care so much and are willing to sacrifice either, they need to be proactive rather than wait for emergency pleas for help.