With lemmy, if someone is squatting a bunch of forums and moderating them, you can always start your own lemmy instance and start your own forum with the same title.

Jimbo Wales from Wikipedia said “It takes 5 users to keep a website active”. For the foreign-language Wikipedia clones, the ones that had at least 5 users did well. The ones that didn’t have 5 users just died.

Is there a way to find out a site’s blocklist?

I solved this problem once. What you do is have a custom captcha that you code yourself. It can be as simple as “What is 2+3?” and have 10-20 questions that you rotate between. Most spammers will be too lazy to update their spambot.

It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle. The only people here now are the people who are willing to try out something new. If there are enough “early adopters”, Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an “eternal September” effect of declining quality. Then they’re followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.

If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.

There’s one big weakness. There appears to be some sort of shared blocklist. If people wind up being placed on the list for petty reasons rather than genuine misbehavior, that could become a problem. I.e., the people maintaining the blocklist decide they disagree with X politically, and then X winds up on the blocklist even though they really weren’t abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people won’t bother doing.

Exactly. Switching from Reddit to Discord is just switching from a website controlled by one evil corporation to one controlled by a different evil corporation. Discord is still in hyper-growth mode, so they aren’t going to be screwing over users yet. Reddit is in “cash out our chips” mode, so screwing over users for profit is the way to do it. In 2-3 years, the investors in Discord will start wanting to see revenue. That’s when they’ll start introducing user-hostile features.