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?
Lemmy is built around forums, which is very distinct from microblogging when it comes to moderation and management.
You don’t get the same kind of context collapse as on Twitter. You don’t get the same kind of dependency on server wide shared culture like on many niche Mastodon servers. Although context collapse still happens to some degree on reddit and may happen here when threads gets popular, it’s possible for forums to be moderated to minimize it and enforce quality. You don’t get nearly as many people trying to enforce their rules in others’ spaces, because forum makes it clear that it’s not “your feed” (like how some try to control what they see not with filters but instead by harassing people who post stuff they don’t like), here it’s somebody’s forum and somebody else is the moderator. You can stop seeing specific content by blocking those forums instead of blocking the users. Forums which you don’t interact with doesn’t affect you!
Because of how the federation works here, volume alone is never the main problem. Forums can be hosted on small instances just fine. Users on small instances can use big forums just fine. If a particular forum is poorly moderated it can be blocked regardless of where it’s hosted. Admins for small servers can filter content from problematic servers, regardless how big they are, and can do it on a per-forum basis too in order to avoid collateral.
Spurious defederation between servers where one has a lot of users is where the problems gets complicated.