The devs' politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it's a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you'd often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I'm not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.

Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.

I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I'm sure they're capable of working through the issues we're facing today, but I don't think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.