Maybe if there were enough users, federation might resist mod abuse
This is key right here, but users need to be using a diverse set of instances. Lemmy.world needs to stop being “the default”. There shouldn’t be “a default”. Maybe for when you first sign up, but people need to be moving to self-hosted and/or niche interest instances. That’s the best way to prioritize diversity in the ecosystem.
Frankly, anyone who’s on a lemmy.whatever domain or kbin.whatever should be finding smaller, more manageable instances to move to as they discover the fediverse. This will be aided when 0.19.0 comes out in a few weeks and enables the export/import for accounts.
One thing I appreciate about how the incentives of the platform are set up is that, since there’s no global account counter of up/downvotes, there’s really no loss in migrating. As long as I can keep my communities, subscriptions, blocks, and saved posts, I’ll have lost nothing.