a bare minimum of good behavior

See, the correct definition for this here is “no transphobia”

It’s cute that you think you can fight back against reactionary BS by arguing with it, but history does not bear this out. What you end up doing is creating another space where people can post Tucker Carlson’s latest Very Concerned mouth diarrhea, only distilled into a more toxic form that even Tucker couldn’t get away with, as long as they say it politely. Your way has led us here, to a political situation where people are actively trying to eradicate trans people in law.

There is only one necessary converation around trans people, in which trans people say, Let us exist without being harassed or persecuted, and everyone else says, OK. Anything else is just allowing bigots a platform.

If you’re a liberal, as most Redditors are, you probably won’t like it much, but Hexbear.net is far more active, and has plenty of news posted. (Keep in mind that “liberal” here covers all of the US political spectrum that doesn’t qualify as fascist; i.e. moderate republicans are liberals too. Hexbear is a communist instance.) It’s not mentioned on join-lemmy yet because it’s a fork, but there are efforts ongoing to merge back to upstream so federation is possible (one of the main roadblocks is the much-higher volume of activity, which is uncovering bugs that don’t show up under lighter loads).

I don’t agree that there should be strictures that enforce similarity to Reddit on instances if they want to be recommended. You’ve apparently been using Lemmy for three days now, based on your git repo history and your top-level comment in this thread. As a longtime Lemmy user, allow me to point out that Lemmy is not, and should not seek to be, exactly like Reddit. To enforce that would be to stifle potential avenues of improvement (like, as I’ve mentioned, removing downvotes).

Also, growth for growth’s sake is not something I think should be sought after; your policies seem to be entirely focused on growth with no concern for quality or community, which I don’t agree with.

I strongly disagree with #2 through #4.

2. Just because redditors expect downvotes doesn’t make them good. When Hexbear removed downvotes, the community feel improved dramatically; downvotes both promote toxic debatebro behavior (by making people upset when they catch a wave of downvotes) and allow cowards to attack people silently from the shadows, without having to actually state their shitty views and be criticized for them.

3. NSFW content tends to alienate people. Besides, there’s no way to tell via code whether an instance allows NSFW content or just allows people to mark content as NSFW (two very different things).

4. Yeah because that was such a positive aspect of Reddit, just ask violentacrez.

Because that would end up making a good portion of potential users feel uncomfortable using the site. There is no lack of pornography on the Internet, go look at it elsewhere.