I think the key here is reminding ourselves why we are on lemmy, as opposed to other social media sites. I’ll speak for myself, having recently discovered lemmy on reddit while looking for alternatives to that site:
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Lack of corporation/state control (i.e. tencent buying a stake in reddit),
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Lack of censorship (while bearing in mind that individual communities can and should retain the right to enforce rules)
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Privacy (lightweight interface which doesn’t sell your data to advertisers)
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A new start (ideally learning from mistakes of previous forum/social media endeauvours)
In my opinion structurally incentivising long form debate as opposed to hot takes in political/worldnews instances is one way of improving the discourse. I enjoy the r/geopolitics approach (though I am aware that many here will disagree with the political slant of that subreddit), in that submissions are heavily regulated and require an input from the OP as to why they are posting a given source.
One thing I would also say from my perspective, is that I am a novice in regards to the technical elements of lemmy as far as federalised platforms and struggle to participate in technology based privacy discussions.
Perhaps outreach from the more tech savvy elements of the lemmy community towards “tech novices” (as I say among which I count myself) in regards to internet privacy and the privacy benifits of lemmy and other such endeauvours would be helpful here in retaining users. It should be easy to find a simple explanation on the advantages of lemmy vis a vis other (hopefully soon to be) obsolete (heh) platforms.
Some of these points don’t directly attatch to the discussion of the OP, but I feel this thread has engendered much discussion in the wider community.
tl;dr: privacy, lack of massed external interference good, outreach to less tech savvy, but privacy interested users good, dispensing with a datascraping monetisation model very good, repeating mistakes of established platforms bad bad bad
Edit: Cleanup
I will defer on the broader point due to my lack of expertise, but I would suggest (based on your explanation) that there exist different levels of explicit and implicit control.
It is a win in itself to reduce overt interference and affirming the highest degree independence possible, even given deeper possibilities of interference i.e. servers as you describe (again I have no specific knowledge on that front).
I would argue that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, a reduction in control by specific large interests is a good thing and should be looked at comparatively and in a context of what is possible at a given point in time.
“Selling” is an aggressive word I wouldn’t use either, I was more suggesting offering honest, clear, but most importantly easily digestible explanations to those who are already looking for alternatives.
Edit: Cleanup
Edit: On “censorship” and “free speech”
I have practically no knowledge about how these far right echo chambers manifest themselves on established platforms or newly created ones. I do think it is essential to thread the needle between keeping an open platform and rejecting intentional manipulation by large cohorts of politically motivated internet activist groups.
In my opinion a good forum caters to individuals and a free exchange of ideas among these (within reason). The brigading of a given instance by any organised community should be structurally disincentivised, as it destroys that principle.