Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.

However, at the time, there really weren’t all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it’s been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn’t last long).

Now it’s kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It’s unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.

CSAM is still unfortunately an issue on Lemmy. Just yesterday I had to contact an admin of the 2nd largest instance directly to get a post removed that had been up for several hours. Worst of all, it had more upvotes than downvotes. I do applaud the admin for taking action the minute I notified them, but it should never have been able to get that far.

Also, some of the issues involving Lemmy developers really remind me of major Minecraft servers back in the day lol. There’s just an inability for the “helpers” to do much problem solving because of the lack of tools, and absolute reliance on the person at the top to take action. Even then, the person at the top doesn’t always have the skill set necessary to solve the issues that arise.

I look forward to seeing how Sublinks goes, but without a good reason for users to migrate it could be dead on arrival.