The reasons I’ve seen given is that it’s a huge instance and at one point only had 1 moderator. So when instance admins complained about a user there, they didn’t always get a response. I think they’ve got more moderators there now, but not sure if it’s solved the problem.

Some Mastodon admins are very concerned about protecting their users from abuse, and want to limit it as much as possible. And that might be 100% appropriate for their users… people who don’t like it should move to a different instance.

I was on an instance that limited mastodon.social, which means you don’t normally see posts from there, and anyone on there that wants to follow you needs permission. But if you follow people there, their posts will appear normally in your feed.

Because of its size, I think a lot of instances are hesitant to defederate completely… (but that’s part of the problem with having such a big instance). I think quite a few limit it though. Some instances list all instances they limit/block and might even have a reason why they do it, but some don’t seem to have any info about that at all.

I moved to an instance where it wasn’t limited. Haven’t noticed a huge difference, either in terms of increased activity or higher levels of abusive posts/bad behaviour.

I’ve been thinking that it is probably easier to move a community from a platform like Reddit to the Fediverse than it is from Twitter. I have used both Twitter and Reddit a lot, but have moved off Twitter and now use Mastodon. Mastodon works pretty well for me, but it’s taken a lot of work to get there, and there are parts of the communities (mostly related to my work) I want to connect with that just don’t exist on Mastodon.

But the big difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter/Mastodon is that on Reddit/Lemmy I am interested in communities for topics that are mostly hobbies/entertainment etc. for me, so I don’t really care about who I’m interacting with… I can’t really name more than a handful of regular users or mods on the Reddit subs I’ve been using for more than a decade. But it’s not really important for interacting there, because it’s about interacting with people who have an interest in a particular topic no matter who they are. On Twitter/Mastodon (at least how I use it), the specific people I’m interacting with are more important.

So it seems the “lock in” of Reddit is weaker than Twitter, and I think it’ll be quicker to establish communities here. A community on Lemmy with a few hundred people contributing (posts/comments) is already pretty successful and enjoyable. It doesn’t matter that the equivalent community on Reddit has over a million people (and in fact it’s often better if it’s smaller!).

That weaker lock in and the fact that Reddit seems to be massively undervaluing the contribution mods and third-party app devs make to the platform make me think Reddit is going to quickly regret this whole fiasco.