IMO the "replicate reddit, but decentralized" approach will be the downfall of Lemmy. You sound like you're trying to do the right thing, but there is significantly more moderator centralization and authoritarianism on Lemmy than there was on early reddit. Most of the early reddit mods were people who genuinely had an interest or experience in that subs topic; not the tankie or excommunicated from elsewhere simply "domain squatting" dozens of popular community names and then dictating over them once they grew popular; trying to carve out their own personal safe space soap boxes. I have seen dozens of mods who'll debate someone and when they lose they just delete all of the opposing comments and ban the user they disagree with. Often they are the one and only mod of that community.

Users left Reddit because they didn't wanna have to deal with continued enshittification and unaccountable bad faith mods on a power trip. Lemmy only solved the former, and doubled down on the latter, while fragmenting users across numerous duplicate communities about the same topic; leading to significant post duplication amongst a sea of inactive duplicate communities.

If Lemmy doesn't solve its core issues I don't expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later. I feel like users should be able to join a group of communities about the same topic, and moderator control should be both diluted and distributed amongst them. As in, redistribute moderation across the user base by randomly showing a group of users a post/comment and using the average rather than relying on whoever created the sub to act in good faith. Decentralized services should be built as trustless/adversarial; expect and account for bad faith actors. I wouldn't have any problem being required to moderate a post/comment for every post/comment I make, I just don't want the responsibility of being a permanent mod, nor having to review every single thing myself.