Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
Moderation. We had a big influx of users with the Reddit api drama that created a bunch of communities, and then all returned to Reddit shortly thereafter, leaving most of the big communities largely unmoderated. The threadiverse isn’t going to become less toxic until new moderators step in and clean up the worst of it.