Applicable to the early days of any platform. The early adopters are those that are comfortable being away from the masses on popular alternatives. They are aware their comments and posts will get less views and engagement and therefore can be less restrained. They also need to be relatively tech literate since it’s less user friendly than more established platforms.
The result is you get a certain type of person that is more willing to speak their mind rather than craft the most acceptable response.
Lemmy is still more reddit influenced than old emerging platforms, so we get more of a mix which creates differing expectations.
Not saying it’s good or bad, but once a platform develops and attracts the general public, there’s usually an outcry for the “old days”.
Since it’s a death at a constant rate with threat of increase. It’s also random and not preventable. So I think we would just accept it as another risk we live with but don’t think about.
In terms of humanity’s progress. Most advances happened through incremental progress and most historical figures could be replaced with similar people from their family of political party that would have yielded similar results. There probably a few people that genuinely couldn’t be replaced, but the chance of them being fingered seems like a statical anomaly.
Socially it could be quite a change. A magic hand could easily become a piece of worship and establish a cult. The idea of it being a human hand would give the impression that humans are the default life form which would add more resistance to animal rights. The biggest one is the race of the hand… Which, given human history, would definitely have been used to justify some horrific actions.