Lemmy is turning into a left-wing echo chamber. The mods have declared that right-leaning opinions are not welcome and are defederating from any right-leaning instances. If you declare that half the population is not welcome, you're really limiting your reach. It's also going to be a pain to have two logins, one for lemmy.world and one for the free speech instances.
You create your own community. If the mods are jerks, you can convince people to switch.
Someone would just start their own lemmy instance if the mods are unreasonable.
No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.
A site like Reddit could be run on a skeleton crew of 20-50 people. That's what Elon Musk is trying to do somewhat with Twitter, slashing unnecessary employees. (Example: How many people are working on lemmy?)
Look at it from the viewpoint of an executive. "I managed a 5 person team." makes you sound like a loser. "I managed a 100 person division" makes you sound like a Big Important Person, even if 95 of those jobs were unnecessary.
Also look at it from the viewpoint of investors. If an investor puts $200M into Reddit, they want Reddit to be spending $100M-$200M on growth. No investor would put $200M into reddit if reddit was going to just run a barebones operation spending $20M per year and then coasting for 10 years off the investment money.
That isn't the way the Internet works. If the 220k lemmy users were the most active out of the 800m, then reddit is basically dead.
Actually, the government did just call up Twitter and tell them to censor things. That's the whole point of the Matt Taibbi Twitter Files stories. But you also have other non-government groups policing the Internet, calling up Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc and demanding censorship.
On every conspiracy theory forum, there's at least one person posting antisemitic stuff. It's a standard trick to discredit them. I.e., person A posts a true conspiracy theory X. Person B posts the same conspiracy theory and also something antisemtic. Does that automatically mean X is wrong?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/kwpqmn/is-the-pr-industry-buying-influence-over-wikipedia
They're probably smart enough to not get caught nowadays.
There are conspiracy theories on the Internet that Google and Facebook were created to centralize control of the Internet in a few large corporations, who then would be able to control what information people see. You also have to think bigger than government. Who has more influence? The President? Or the CEO of Blackrock and other large hedge funds, who control all the voting shares in pretty much every public corporation?
For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere. You can cover up real problems by never mentioning them at all. The CEO of Google is NOT elected. A couple of hedge fund managers get to pick the CEO of Google.
How do you know that there's only one person working the account? When you're a reddit moderator, it's anonymous (same on Wikipedia). For all we know, all the power mods are working at a PR firm somewhere. Spreading misinformation could be their full-time job. Controlling the flow of information on Reddit and Wikipedia could be worth more than Reddit's actual profit.
Maybe the problem is that your definition of fascism is "anyone who disagrees with me"?