It’s scale.
Scale is the enemy of social networks. All of them, including Lemmy.
Let’s say 0.1% of the population are just straight up assholes who ruin everything.
If you only got 100 people on a site, no one is an asshole.
1000 people? Well now you got that asshole Andy in the group. Fucking Andy. But we can deal with him.
But we scale up to 1,000,000? Well now you got 1000 fucking assholes to deal with!
I just feel bad for people who went in during Elon's "good" years (heavy quotations). He's nothing but a glorified car salesman and a verified idiot now, but for a while there, some people just wanted a more sustainable car.